I started using Crunchbang because it was so lightweight and ran great on Virtual Box on Windows 7. I stopped using it, when they stopped developing it. I wasn’t aware of ++. I will be installing it this evening.

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.