"Unfortunately, choosing a Linux configuration good for a certain purpose and for certain hardware frequently requires either a lot of experience or the wasting of much time with trying various variants."

This is why I stay with windows for my dev machines and either use WSL or ssh to a linux box. All my machines at home have WSL2 installed and I use it as my default shell, I never open powershell/cmd, they may as well not be on my machine, for all my development needs and use all the linux tools that I would be using if I was on a native linux desktop.

I can be up and running on a windows dev machine in the time it takes me to download VScode and open it, or I can spend weeks trying to get a linux environment to the same place. With my setup I still have all my linux toolset that I would use on a linux desktop, but I don't have to contend with all the issues of getting a linux desktop environment running.

I have run into all the same problems as the parent of this and more, I have tried different desktop environments including Gnome, KDE, Mate, Cinnaman, and XFCE. I have moved between xorg and wayland more times then I care to count, each ended up giving a different set of problems.

At the end of the day, I want to spend my time being productive and getting work done, not fighting with my OS to get the basics running. I love linux but it's just not ready to replace windows on the desktop.