> Free software, not open source. The difference matters. Copyleft is important.

I very much agree! I've learned to strongly appreciate the FSF philosophy. And I too appreciate (and use, and advocate for) end-user-modifiable software.

However, when talking about software brittleness, user-facing Free (as in Libre) software is usually even worse than non-Free Open Source software.

I'm currently running nth version of Ubuntu, but in the past I've been running Debian, Red Hat, (briefly) Gentoo, Slackware, and further in the past some others which I don't recall now. In my experience, things are systematically getting better over time, but are still fragile compared to Windows (and Windows isn't exactly a paragon of stability either).

(Of course there are many places where proprietary = worse, UX-wise. In particular, just about any crapware preloaded by seller/manufacturer on your computer or phone, or stuff that gets bundled with printers, scanners and other peripherals.)

My point isn't that Free Software and Open Source software are bad things. Just that they suck too, and when talking OSes and popular tools, they suck on average a bit more than proprietary software.

Hmm, I recognize your personal journey with tech as very similar to my own. You're at that phase where you got sick of the churn and so just want to settle on something that's not going to change out from under you. You went through the "try everything" phase years ago. I understand the reluctance to go back to that life, I really do.

But it's better now, and Arch Linux is that better. I'm using the Openbox version of Arco Linux, because it gives me a usable desktop right out of the box. Another significant source of instability is desktop environments, the number of times I pulled my hair out over Gnome is many. It's hard to go against the grain when running Ubuntu, but it's really easy with Arch.

Eventually you'll hit that sweet spot of stable usability. But you have to build on a real foundation. Ubuntu can't be that anymore. Package management with Arco is stupidly easy, just 'yay anything' and it'll give you a list of stuff to install. You have to learn how to script it if that's what you want to do but it's worth it in the end.