It's literally not though. For anyone dipping their toes into Linux for the first time Ubuntu is by far and large the best place for them to start. Cononical has made a continuous concerted effort over all these years to make Linux more accessible to the layperson and it certainly shows in Ubuntu's user friendly-ness. It might not be the right choice for someone with more knowledge of the inner-workings of Linux, or maybe not the right choice for someone who is concerned with the issues around SNAP, but the average user and especially a new Linux user does not care about these things.
OR3X
IDK man, I've been using it exclusively on my main desktop at home and I've been getting along just fine with those "not particularly good" applications.
Honestly, it's way more convoluted and frustrating than it has any right to be. The only tools I found were cursor-toolbox which allows you to convert SVG templates to the correct set of PNGs and xcursorgen which converts the PNGs to actual cursor files. It took me several tries just get a working cursor set. Then I spent much much longer actually drawing and tweaking my theme using inkscape. It was certainly rewarding to get it working though. Now I smile every time I see the little "busy" animation.
I'm in the same boat so I started getting my "tweaking" fix by making my own themes. Just got my first cursor theme working and it's awesome!
I just recently went through some linux printer woes. When my toner cartridge got down below 25% documents spooled from my Linux machine would fail with an out of toner error. Files from windows and the diagnostic pages from the printer itself printed just fine. Turned out I had been using a slightly incorrect print driver on my Linux machine this entire time. After a TON of digging I managed to find the correct driver and was able to print again. Only wasted most of a morning figuring it out. Lol!
I'm just joking around, it looks good!
Looks Mint! 😂
Speed. Unfortunately (at least the last time I looked into it) NVENC still beats the socks off of VAAPI in render times and I'm sure Nvidia likes it that way.
I'm unfortunately stuck with Nvidia for the time-being because I need NVENC.
I'm on Nvidia and have had the same experience as you. Everything just works.
I dicked around with the VM route for a while and could never really get it working 100% to my liking. There was always a trade-off. I ended up just getting a second PC and tucking it in a cabinet out of sight. When I need Windows I just use remote desktop to connect to it.
I've been using screenfetch.