I am not going to be debating what exact problems you had, but I must be extremely lucky if all those years I never had any kind of showstopper critical issue that made me think "Ok, I can't deal with this and I have to go back to a proprietary desktop".
It's been at least since 2012 that I had installed Linux and couldn't connect a printer or scanner. Meanwhile my wife's laptop on windows asked to reinstall drivers every time she wanted to print something. Webcams? No problem. Wi-fi? No problem as long as I didn't try to use a chipset that was either too obscure or too new and unsupported.
The one thing that I gave up on having on my laptop is low-latency audio to connect a guitar and use software audio effect processors. But the way I solved this was by using a separate old laptop with a custom kernel dedicated to be my "guitar effect box". I still didn't have to give up my freedoms and I did not have to give up any functionality/comfort.
> But hey, it all has to do with how it looks right?
I believe you when you say that LXDE was snappier than the other Ubuntu alternatives, but were the alternatives slower than whatever version of Windows you have now? That will be very hard to believe.
So forgive me for sounding condescending, but you went with probably the most obscure and least popular Ubuntu flavor - the one that has probably almost to no funding from Canonical and maybe a handful of developers interested on it. What were you expecting, exactly?
If Ubuntu was bad for you, maybe try Fedora? If you wanted a more knowledgeable community, maybe try Arch? Why instead of sticking with your preconceptions of how things should work, you ask what are the others doing that let them be productive on a FOSS Desktop? Why is it that upon hitting difficulties your reaction is to go back to the comfort zone of a proprietary and familiar system?
> only option that is even remotely viable
We must have very different thresholds for defining "remotely viable". From http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2020-05-22-my-new-FreeBSD-la... :
"Is FreeBSD ready for the desktop? Yes and no. Yes, in that I have a very nice FreeBSD laptop where everything works the way I want. But no, in that it took me two months worth of fiddling with this in my spare time to fix some of the "glitches" which arose; while there wasn't anything particularly challenging, I expect that most people would give up long before they fixed all of the issues I ran into.
On the other hand, can FreeBSD be ready for the desktop? Absolutely. I've fixed the issues I ran into — and once we have FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE with packages built for that release the process of bringing up a GUI will be much easier, as well. The biggest thing FreeBSD needs is to have developers acquiring laptops and carefully working their way through the issues which arise; the FreeBSD Foundation has already started doing this, and I hope in the months to come they — and other FreeBSD users — will publish reports telling us which laptops work and what configuration they need."