Using any tool that vibrate much like a string trimmer will irritate where my spine is pinched and I’ll regret it for months. It makes me feel useless. Fusing 4 discs in my upper back or neck would almost guaranteed make me feel more useless.

I definitely can’t pretend I’m young anymore. It isn’t just pain, and when it is pain it’s not the worst pain. It makes me unable to feel my arm. I had to get an epidural of steroids to get the inflammation down to get feeling back, and I seem to be at least mildly allergic to that .

yes

Ubuntu is fine. Drivers are annoying on all distros (nvidia updates for me mainly, I don’t update hardware often).

I have daily driven various distros and tested a lot since the 90s and I pay close attention to time spent on customizing and fixes, and ubuntu just isn’t worse than other distros. I make setup scripts and have custom dockerfiles for webtops.

I want to like nixos or whatever fork will prevail, but it’s more work than people want to admit. I personally don’t want to have to pay that much attention to my operating system. It’s why i ditched gentoo almost 20 years ago. I don’t want to lurk forums for fixes and tweaks. I also make sure hardware I buy doesn’t have glaring compatibility issues.

If Ubuntu rubs you the wrong way but you are fine with most of it, just use debian.