fell

A true mainstream Linux distro would need guidelines like this:

• The user is never be expected to type a command into a terminal.
• The user is never be expected to edit a configuration file.
• There is a graphical UI for every possible action the user might want to (or have to) do.

This especially includes:

• Configuring audio devices
• Installing graphics drivers
• Updating the operating system
• Managing applications and storage space
• Connecting to networked storage
• Adjusting kernel parameters (This is neccessary on certain hardware, yet, barely any distro has a graphical UI for it.)

The only distro that comes close to this is Linux Mint, but not even Mint covers everything I just mentioned.

If we want Linux to succeed, there needs to be at least one distro that confidently ships without a terminal.

I convinced my wife to dual booting Linux Mint. She uses it every now and then, but she primarily still uses Windows 10. I hope she will abandon it once she sees this. She absolutely detests ads of any kind.

Thank you all for your ideas, I managed to solve the problem. It was somewhat hardware related, but not really.

I was using BTRFS, which creates a lot of write amplification and aged SSDs don't handle that well. According to a study from 2017, btrfs can cause up to 32x write amplification, absolutely hammering its performance: https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1707.08514

I converted my system to RAID0 using EXT4 and the stutters and freezes are gone.

can’t afford to buy a house

My simple solution to this problem: Just don't buy a house then. Just accept you'll never own real estate and move on.

Try searching it on https://btdig.com/, a DHT search engine. Most of the torrents there are very old and have barely any seeds. Be patient. The last thing I downloaded from there took 1-2 weeks to complete.

That's what I do. I seed for as long as it remains on disk.