Hold off Microsoft! I got my girlfriend to try Linux because she like the bar on the side.

Exactly my case two years ago. After while of using Fedora she said "I though linux is more different."

She forgets on Win quickly and probably never go back.

I ended up picking Fedora too because I thought KDE Plasma and Fedora would be easy, stable, and up-to-date enough. There hasn't been much issue so far. I really wanted to go NixOS like I run to make it reproducible, but the casual user ergonomics would be too difficult. :(

I've been using valinet/ExplorerPatcher on Win11 for a bit just to bring back all the old Win10 taskbar stuff. I know we should even need this, but I hope this is helpful.

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

Sadly that's x64 only and will likely never support Arm, so I've been stuck with the shitty taskbar on the VM on my mac.

Works very well on x64 though.

Using startallback for this, no excuse for Microsoft but it seriously improved my windows 11 experience.

+1 for startallback I just paid them $5 this morning and I couldn't be happier. I am able to have my taskbars exactly how I want them. The productivity gain has paid for itself many times over.

Depends on how WinUI / WinAppSDK folks manage.

https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues