In my case I began with DOS and later, Windows 98. I loved Windows 98SE/XP and Linux looked cool, "industrial" server graded OS but unusable for the desktop. As my Debian skills skyrocketed by a 20 euro bargain sale of Debian Sarge (4 DVD's, 3 for sw and 1 for the sources), I never went back to Windows.
Today I use Slackware 14.2 on a netbook and -current (almost 15 nowadays) as my desktop OS. No driver issues, every emulated game works.
I use either text mode via framebuffer (I can even watch videos and run SDL2 based cool stuff like mednafen) or fluxbox.
I don't care on modern gaming, Slashem and IF killed modern graphical-intensive games but with a childish and boring script. Kinda like the current decade trend of Marvel superhero movies.
I had more fun reading classical sci-fi comics from the 50's.
BG was cool... at 18. Today I have no time to follow a 20000 pages long script
based not on sequential reading, but on choices. Slashem has better and more
inmersive RPG elements (Nethack was the king of emergent gameplay) and I
can play it anywhere on any machine from a 486 or a Classic Mac.
Mednafen does magic for my gf, two player 8-16 bits classics with a gamepad while I use the keyboard. It works even without X. No DLC's, no always online. Oh, and Jap nerds
translated loads of games into English. I am not an English native, but for sure I can read English better than Kanji.
On media, I don't care on Spotify, I have curseradio-improved, yt-dlp, Jamendo and Radio Paradise, and MPV plays HD content from Youtube and may other sites perfectly.
My offline music collection (streamripper to Radio Paradise) does it better with the "shuffle" function on mocp.
Fire and forget.
Time for my family? No social media, no "always connected" bullshit. I don't have to follow 2000 notifications on the
framebuffer as in a GUI or a smarthone.
https://68k.news, https://lite.cnn.io, https://efe.com for my country's news and Slashdot/HN/Lobste.rs has anything I want to read. Even in text mode.
I also have some good times with Gopher and magical.fish/sdf.org and the tildeverse.
Condensed geekeery thanks to few members, code sharing
and a low volume of posts. Heaven.
And, maybe, bbs@uncensored.citadel.org via SSH from time
to time.
Ah, a lot of people posted personal blogs on Gopher, so I can read posts back to ~2007 with the Gopher revival,
and I can read it on a slow pace. The protocol is fast enough and there's no lag to load the sites, OFC.
Visual Studio? Heh. Nowadays almost everything I do it's cloud containered bullshit so there's very little to code, I almost do (jim)tcl and a bit of C for fun.
At home, everything else it's scripted over with a script called "do_the_internet.sh" pulling and fetching rss, mail, usenet news and podcasts. Once a week. No info overload.
Ironically thanks to that I spend much less time with the computer than you thanks to scripting ;), so I can focus on different stuff such as reading long books and biking.
And, yes, I geek sometimes, OFC, but with a fast as hell Fluxbox netbook, I can chat everywhere thanks to SSH (mosh) and Bitlbee (IRC gateway to Telegram/Jabber and whatever Pidgin supports), and hack and slash with Slashem on top of a mountain by using the phone's wifi sharing.
No ads. No unwanted updates. No pop-ups. No crapware.
Batteries last hours.
If you are on Windows, get a Gopher client and head to gopher://magical.fish and gopher://sdf.org.
Your brain will thank you.