One huge thing is that stuff you create gets set to 777. In the Windows environment, this is expected. But outside of /mnt/c I would figure that standard Linux perms would be honored. Nope. This has been very inconsistent.

That leads me to conclude that my options are either to figure out all the workarounds to do stuff from Windows natively, or keep a Linux VM handy.

I used to be jealous of people that ran Macs or Windows because they did seem to "just work" better than a Linux machine, though had inferior packaging systems and security features.

These days, my Dell laptop running Ubuntu 16.04 seems to have less problems with audio/video in conference calls than the Macs my coworkers use, and there are vendors like Dell or System76 that'll sell you a pre-configured system if you don't want to fiddle with things.