I’m only commenting this because you said you’re stuck on Win11 and not defending it, but…

Using winget and Chocolately will make your app installation much better.

Also, to reload your path variable in a PowerShell prompt you can run the following:

$env:Path = [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path","Machine") + ";" + [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path","User")

Again, your gripes are all legitimate, but these might help ease your pain.

I took a similar path but eventually ended up on openSUSE for my desktop. I’ve been pretty happy with it. I can’t think of a single issue that I wasn’t able to quickly resolve. I even got CUDA installed and working in under an hour.

I tested out Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mint before landing on openSUSE. It by far has been the most stable. Especially when dealing with my Nvidia GPU and getting CUDA working.

And I thought I was a hardened criminal for sticking a bunch of beets in the mayor’s fridge.

I’ve played around with a few of them. I’ve found LM Studio the most robust and user friendly.

I grew up in Texas and moved to England. I remember my first weekend there looking at a map thinking of going to visit Cambridge. It was a couple of inches away on the map and I thought, should be an hour maybe an hour and half drive. Imagine my surprise when I arrived in Cambridge in 20 minutes. I forgot to take into consideration scale.

Yes it was a paper map, I know I’m old.

It doesn’t appear to be there anymore, but I remember reading Dave Grohl’s wikipedia page and there was a controversy section and it just talked about the DUI he got on a scooter.

Must change every 90 days

It has been 6 years since NIST told companies to stop doing this. And I’d be willing to bet there are more companies still mandating this than ones that don’t.