I finally have the misfortune of encountering windows 11. What a hot steaming pile of garbage.

Someone at microsoft needs to be told that consent applies to computers too. So much crap installed and reinstalled automatically no matter what you do. Things repin themselves to start after you unpin them. You click to uninstall garbage and it isn't in the installed apps. There is no way to get rid of the recommendations in the start menu, only allegedly how many of them, and they are closer to the start button than the stuff you pinned. Total user hostile UI disaster.

I really think that in the future if you want my help you have to be willing to switch to Ubuntu LTS. We both know all you use is the browser anyway. 

 I have a low range win 8 laptop from 2014 and it runs 2 times faster than a mid range laptop running win 10 or 11 (had both on it) from 2022. 

 I always recommend mint to the microsofugees. I use Debian myself but it seems the most familiar to them. 

 I like Ubuntu because I have PTSD from the early rolling release distros like arch when it was new. Maybe it improved but back in the day you had to watch every update for breaking shit you had to do manually.

5 years standard support and 10 years security support with pro (free) and no release changes breaking things is very nice for stability and them not needing help from me for a long time.

I'll load up a mint VM to check it out and see how it compares.  

 Never tried Mint? Awww man. You'll see what I mean, I bet. It's very GUI focused but same ol Linux/GNU undercarriage.