I am increasingly feeling that computers just aren't "for" me anymore. Maybe they never were, and sheer novelty combined with youthful neuroplasticity helped me push through. (I am willing to chalk-up a significant amount of my dissatisfaction to being an "oldster".)
Using computers is significantly less enjoyable for me now than it used to me. Updates being installed without my consent, telemetry and surveillance being forced upon me, loss of functionality when features I use aren't popular enough to warrant continued inclusion in products, and software developers who are actively hostile toward allowing "power users" configuration options all detract from the enjoyment I used to have.
I share this feeling, and I've found some relief by reducing the complexity of my configuration by an order of magnitude.
I only do computing on 3 platforms: A text-mode Lisp VM (Emacs), the Web (Firefox) and Unix (Xterm).
My Linux configuration is really simple. No desktop enviroment. Just a simple manual tiling window manager. StumpWM is my favorite option, but ExWM or dwm also work fine.
I could use macOS or Windows, but with Linux I can simplify furhter. In some distributions, there's a minimal layer between me and upstream. Just creating binaries and dealing with dependencies. An easy litmus test for a good distribution is to set up the above configuration and check what is running with e.g. htop. Is it clean, with nothing added by me?
I have learned not to change defaults till I understand why they are there. That's an intance of Chesterton's fence, a very useful heuristic. Owing to this, I have very few dotfiles, which are ~100 LOC. They are completely trivial. I almost know them by heart.
NixOS and GuixSD are an interesting alternative. They make simple things very simple. You can set up your whole machine in a declarative manner with a few LOC placed in a single file. Nothing breaks, it's functional. You can rollback anytime. However, some complicated things require a lot more work than with a normal setup, others less.