Windows ME wasn't a sadist. It would have to actually work to get that far. The best thing that happened to a laptop I had which came with ME installed was to put Win98 on it. Ran great after that.

Eh, Vista itself wasn't that bad, the issues stemmed from both marketing way to low quality devices as compatible, and developers getting used to UAC.

Also, Vista did not have the shitty new settings app.

Go on... Pop!_OS? KDE Fedora? And why? I was about to move to Mint Cinnamon 22.2 until you said this, but I'm open to recs.