Debian and Ubuntu seem to be the way to go in terms of pre-compiled performance, and I also wanted to pick the most popular one.
That's why I run Debian. Or something like that, anyway.
The reason I don't run Ubuntu is two-fold. 1, they depend upon a snapshot of Debian Unstable, which as its name implies is NOT STABLE. 2, it's absolutely loaded with people who have no idea what they're doing, and have software confused with politics, exactly as you experienced.
If you count all the forks, Ubuntu's is definitely growing into the dominant distro in the desktop Linux world.
I don't back the US Government because it's dominant, either.
I rant about other people's stupidity, especially when it involves encouraging government force and then calling it "freedom"!
In their forums, where they are well within their rights to banish you.
And they did.
No, Microsoft doesn't work for me either (unless they've thrown an extra R&D billion at Interix since the last time I checked),
I'll give them credit where credit is due, the install of 7 is much simpler and less visually "noisy" and preachy than prior versions. Still doesn't recognize much hardware, but that's to be expected.
but it does provide the best desktop experience for a non-technical user who actually wants to get shit done.
No it doesn't. The applications are what are or are not going to "get shit done" with a non-technical user, the OS is irrelevant. For getting the OS out of the way so the applications can run
Windows _sucks_.