Turns out the reply in my thread telling me the best way to combat not caring about Linux is to care about Linux was absolutely correct.
I picked up a laptop, installed Linux Mint Cinnamon, and I’m already obsessed. I haven’t had this much fun with a PC in a long time and it’s just a cheapo Dell Inspiron 3520.
This should really be a top level comment. This actually solves a lot of my issues with Linux.
I remember complaining that Linux apps were not self-contained like Windows apps are. And I got the standard speech about losing space with libraries blah blah blah and my reaction is I don’t fucking care.
In my opinion, Linux dependency setup is hilariously broken. I understand that for the most part it works, but when it doesn’t the results are disastrous generally.
Also I agree. Nautilus is hot fucking garbage.
Flatpaks also share runtimes.
Its bad that they have deduplication, its really unsatisfying. But having maaany runtimes in parallel is simply the state of every OS. I dont know about Android, which is really nice. But sucks also. Filemanagers are very restricted for example.
And for example Libreoffice, VLC, SciDavis and others just work well as Flatpak for me