That’s easy: If it’s a service reasonably expected to be present on most desktop systems, it’s part of systemd or will eventually be.

Gentoo will always be there when you want to settle down knowing exactly what you want.

The biggest performance boost from an upgrade in the last two decades was switching from a Western Digital VelociRaptor HDD to a Samsung 840EVO SATA SSD. That was going from 6ms to 0.06 ms random access latency.

The performance boost from switching from Windows to Linux wasn’t perceivable even on Gentoo where I literally compiled for the exact hardware, I had and used a custom debloated monolithic kernel. But it got me a massive boost in user agency and freedom of choice.
You can’t beat two orders of magnitude reaction latency reduction with an OS change. Windows is bloated. But it’s not that bloated (at least Windows XP, 7, and 10 weren’t; didn’t try 11).
I play on Gentoo btw.

I am a gamer and can confirm. For gaming, iGPU is objectively low-end. Doesn’t mean, you can’t play games on it. Current iGPUs are probably better than what games were made to run on two decades ago.
I did have fun playing a selected set of games on an iGPU a decade ago. Dedicated GPUs just give you more pixels, more textures, more shader quality, more geometry, more FPS, and nowadays more AI inference capabilities. Some game genres profit a lot, some don’t at all.

If the SOC makers want their hardware to be popular for longer, they really need to add mainline kernel support.
I looked at them as a tinkering platform. But I don’t want to buy something which is probably abandoned in a few months.

OP’s joke sadly isn’t completely wrong. Some of these are actual pain points on Linux:

Theming is a mess on Linux the moment you mix QT and GTK (and that is pretty common as not everything exists for each toolkit).

File explorers are notoriously shit compared to the Windows Explorer which works well and intuitively for most users (including me). I use PCManFM-Qt now. But I tried a lot before finding this rough gem. And it still does crash once per quarter and often switches to the root folder collapsing the tree when sub folder content changes.

The freedom of choice is indeed bought with the burden of choice on Linux. There are usually multiple choices when searching for a new application. Usually most of them are crap. Some are barely usable. And one or two are actually somewhat production ready. When you’re new to the ecosystem, it’s impossible to know what to look for. Inexperienced users better describe their use case to AI and have it generate a nice overview of options with pros and cons because traditional web search is pretty dead by now.

I play on Gentoo btw.