trollercoaster

The server:

It’s the nuclear option in self hosting.

That’s UI design, a dark art mere mortals like you and me won’t ever understand.

Cygwin is at least well integrated into Windows. It does respect and show its native file system permissions, and you can run windows binaries from within cygwin.

WSL is a load of shit compared to cygwin. No surprise, as it comes straight from Redmond.

I know, but I don’t have any half way recent experience with it, so I don’t know whether I can recommend it. When I last checked it out some years ago, it still lacked functionality regular Ubuntu based Mint had.

I am in the same boat as you. I am still running Ubuntu (with snap removed, so I can’t comment on its current performance overhead) on a few of my machines because I couldn’t be bothered to do a reinstall with something less insane, but I’m not recommending Ubuntu to anyone anymore over the same concerns as you have.

If you want to recommend a system that runs decently out of the box and runs a lot of software, recommend Mint instead. Ubuntu used to be Debian with sane default settings that would run out of the box, nowadays Mint is Ubuntu with sane default settings that will run out of the box. Mint also doesn’t subscribe to this snap madness and is continuing to maintain a few packages Ubuntu has migrated to snap as .deb package (for instance Firefox and Chromium).