Same! I started with Ubuntu back in the days and was shocked how weirdly bad it is nowadays when I was forced to use it at my current project with the client's laptop. I mean the happy path is still all fun and easy but after having Ubuntu installed, it's almost like a Windows experience trying to get stuff installed vs. having AUR available :D
I recommend OpenSuse Tumbleweed if you want stuff to be very up to date (we got the xz backdoor first! yay!) but also easy and stable. And KDE Plasma is pretty good these days. Linux Mint is also good but it's a bit slower with the updates.
The other day it rewrote a registry key that prevented these pop ups.
This is what drove me away. There are like 7 people that figured out how to make these pop-ups disappear and Microsoft invested money to "patch" that "error" to ensure they were forced to continue seeing these ads.
I have to give huge thank you to Valve for making gaming on Linux actually a valid option. I've been mainly a Linux user since 2006 but always had to have a dual-boot setup for gaming. Seeing the progress on Proton, I decided a year or two ago that Windows 10 was going to be the last one I'll have on my PC and since my SSD died a couple of months ago, I didn't even bother to preserve the Win10 installation anymore.
Funnily enough on my front page, the next link below this post was "Microsoft starts testing ads in the Windows 11 Start Menu". I think that pretty much sums it up why I don't want to even try to mess with the thing anymore. It's been a good run and Windows has improved A LOT since XP days but oh dear god all the data harvesting nowadays...