I have to wonder if Ubuntu's prescriptive stance on things like this is becoming increasingly outdated in an age where there's actually a decent experience out of the box for a lot more stuff on Linux. I've long since moved on from using it personally for my devices, but I'm fairly certain my tolerance for spending effort tinkering to get things working like I want is a lot higher than even most Linux users, so it's hard for me to gauge if the window have moved significantly in that regard for the average Linux user.

I find it interesting how many people have Ubuntu in mind when it comes to a Linux desktop when it hasn't been a great experience ever since they switched to Gnome. They don't really care about the desktop anymore. They are now a corporation that is enshitifying their product with things like SNAPs.

If you want a distro that really cares about the desktop experience today, try Linux Mint. Windows users seem to adapt to it quite quickly and easily. It's familiar and has really good defaults that match what people expect.

It's not just Ubuntu, Arch is just as bad. The primary problem is systemd, which provided an adequate OOMd for daemons, but then all the distributions seem to be using it for interactively launched processes

If anybody can help me out with a better solution with a modern distribution, that's about 75% of the reason I'm posting. But it's been a major pain and all the GitHub issues I have encountered on it show a big resistance to having better behavior like is the default for MacOS, Windows, or older Linux.