I miss Arch occasionally but I don’t like being responsible for the operation of my machine; I would rather delegate it to the operating system. ;)
The good thing about Ubuntu is that it’s the default “Linux” (distribution) so whatever you are looking for, there is likely an AskUbuntu question, a .deb package, a blogpost, or a mailing-list entry to help.
I don't know if I agree about software availability if you take AUR into account.
Also, it is dead simple to make your own PKGBUILD script for arch, but last time I tried looking into making a .deb my eyes rolled into the back of my head.
Well so do I (also mainly an Ubuntu user these days), but that can be orthogonal to time spent. I prefer it to Windows, which I used f/t for nearly a year after ditching macOS. I prefer the single file system (as opposed to the wsl/native Windows mishmash). I enjoy its speed (mostly filesystem related I think). I find the desktop (Gnome in my case) simpler yet more flexible at the same time (PaperWM ftw).
But there's no doubt I've spent at least 10x as much time on Ubuntu configuring and reading and fixing.
I have spent a considerable amount of time on Windows turning certain features off, removing some bloatware, and setting up my dev environment so Ubuntu doesn't feel any worse.
The only upside of Windows, and definitely a major one, is power management. On Ubuntu, my battery lasts around 2.5h with moderate use whereas on Windows, it's around 3-4 hours. Yes, I am already using powertop and TLP. =)
There are a few minor things I prefer about Windows here & there, but power management is the biggest single thing, agreed.
In truth I don't like any current OS - when you add up all the pros and cons, Linux has the best overall balance of attributes for my use. It's far from optimal though. I find the state of OSs in 2020 pretty sad.
A late addition because of something that came up today. I've had a laptop problem for a few days - screen blanking was failing. Immediately on blanking, the screen would reawaken, generally rearranging my open windows.
On Windows I would have vaguely but very briefly googled. I would either find a quick fix or not, and be on my way.
On Ubuntu I only bother searching online if I know what software's causing it, and it's open source. Otherwise I find the signal/noise ratio too high (and I rarely get useful answers on SO or other forums - I either get nothing or too many people helpfully but uselessly saying "try this!" "try that!"). More often I just dig into things myself.
So I trawled the syslog, couldn't initially find anything, narrowed down by triggering the issue deliberately while `journalctl -f`'ing, etc. I traced the problem to a recently installed Gnome extension that was crashing X on screen blanking. An uninstall failed so I had to find out where extensions are on the filesystem, remove it manually, restart mutter, etc.
The whole thing took about 25 mins.
The upside for Ubuntu here is that I could actually fix the issue. This is rarely a given with Windows (though for me it produces fewer such small issues). On Windows, if I can't fix something that's not critical within a few minutes, I end up just putting up with it. These accumulate over time and I find the OS increasingly irritating. Ubuntu's irritation level doesn't increase over time (though its plateau is way above zero). The downside for Ubuntu is that this really does involve more fiddling time (a known known because I keep logs). For me (a regular non-expert user) anyway.
I've used Ubuntu for development for the last 5 years, but due to the quarantine & hardware issues at home, I figured I'd give Windows a shot. With WSL 2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux 2) available, it's gotten so good! I can run our dev stack with similar performance to Ubuntu inside the subsystem, while simultaneously enjoying the larger ecosystem of Windows.
The only major roadblock I encountered was with PHPStorm, as it doesn't have native access to files inside the Linux subsystem due to the different file system format. In the end I opted for running an X server on Windows (via MobaXTerm) and running PHPStorm inside the Linux subsystem.
I wouldn't mind going back to Ubuntu (and probably I'll do so when the quarantine ends), but it was a nice surprise to see how good Windows has become for dev work.
