In the late 90s you could get CDROMs from the nerds at university with everything you need on them. If you got your sound card working and could play an mp3, you felt like a master hacker who had beat the game.

Hell yeah! It’ll be super satisfying to give your system a good cleaning and upgrade. Enjoy!

Bad ass! Thank you for this wisdom

Oh word! I forgot about Signal. I use the snap for that. It works well. I think copy/paste works with it.

I used apt for Firefox, Krita, ffmpeg, Blender and Ksnips

I think the big commercial programs I use were installed with vendor scripts

I’m daily driving Ubuntu and my experience aligns with this.

My only gripe is snaps can break copy/paste and prevent me from saving files where I want. This might make Ubuntu unusable for people using Linux for the first time and makes no sense if you dont understand how snaps are sandboxed and how permissions work. The solution is install with apt.

The installer, system configuration programs and UI experience is really good. I argue it is a much superior experience to Windows and arguably better than OS/X. A lot less garbage being shoved down customers throats.