I store a lot of things on external media.

I also use a lot of Flatpaks.

Kill me.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/whinge

Installing apps on Windows is insane though.

Either it’s a custom installer with a dozen pointless steps, or it’s in the Microsoft Store which doesn’t even fucking work without PowerShell workarounds half the time.

Any decent Linux distro is going to be much simpler for simple use cases. Particularly the ones that lean into Flatpak.

DBAs think everything is a database.