Huh?
There's sandbox in Windows now, and before that there was SanboxIE which I never needed though.
The backup on Windows is transparent and keeps all versions of the files. You just need to specify destination when it starts nagging.
Your Python script has nothing to do with OS. I have a few C# scripts for DynDNS and other stuff.
Windows takes about 20GB, and lives with full Visual Studio on a 60GB drive with about 15GB left.
Sounds like you haven't really used Windows after 7.
And yeah, not only I can remote in under a second with either SSH or RDP, I can do gaming easily, train my TensorFlow models, and use multiple monitors with a tiling WM.
Oh, and my laptops sleep well.