I’ll have to look into those and experiment on VMs. Thanks for the info! I used to use Windows 10 LTSC and it worked great, but I wanted the Microsoft Store to experiment with ray tracing in Bedrock Edition of Minecraft as SEUS’s PTGI wasn’t free at the time. I use Windows 11, I’m familiar with debloating the OS since Windows 10 came out. Usually I use Spybot Anti-Beacon 1.6 and WinAero Tweaker. I then remove all the useless apps I can with a script :)
I’m not as lucky when it comes to figuring out problems. I’ve had bad luck with pop_os, at least when I tried it a few years ago. I’m impressed with proton DB in how far it has come but I don’t have much experience with it.
I’ve always enjoyed regular Ubuntu but Linux Mint is a favorite. I’d install that before anything else. I’ve used both on my school laptops with great success. I’d use Linux as the default if it wasn’t for gaming, which is why school laptops (laptops owned by me, used for school) are the perfect use case.