Not the OP but I agree WSL doesn’t offer much over Mac unless you care about GNU vs BSD.

I feel this one. The Finder and file-picking dialogs are genuinely awful.

.NET is just a runtime, not problematic at all, and definitely doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with ads, spyware, and AI.

Brave has a built-in ad blocker based on uBlock. There are lots of reasons people don’t recommend Brave, but the lack of an ad blocker isn’t one of them.