That sounds funny on paper but honestly I haven’t had either of those qualities in many desktops.

Gnome is my go to “get a solid desktop” quick choice. Whenever whatever experimental DE/WM I’m messing with can’t paint a window because it didn’t expect something, Gnome is always there.

Fedora was the first to get my NVidia Card and proprietary wifi card working out of the box without intervening. It also updates my Dell firmware out of the box. Debian, last time I checked, does not. I haven’t tried since before Bullseye.

Similar to Debian but tangentally, I run Guix which falls under the same GNU umbrella of what “free software” is and I have to break that with non-free channels to get the same laptop running.

Debian takes work, especially if you have tricky, proprietary hardware that requires firmware support. It comes with that magical “free software only” mentality that makes it harder to adopt and hence why Ubuntu and Mint exist. It’s a great minimalist distro

I sometimes forget that I’m not the only kind of user who may run a Linux box. I’m not immune to compromise, but I’m not an “average” user like say… Peggy from accounting.

Why is this a requirement? Commercial support?

You may run Fedora in WSL2. This is what I do. My work is largely command line based. Use Wezterm. If you must, launch GUI apps from there. I’m running graphical Emacs daily just fine this way. My coworkers don’t have half the gas for our kubernetes pods that I do and that’s by in large the fact that I refuse to lose my Linux chops

Just ask them why they want to waste the money on licensing. Money is the language managers understand

You could also just use a USB drive or even a CDRW drive 🤓 Imagine a CD with dotfiles sharpied onto it like its 2001