I think this boils down to the state of DEs. GNOME and KDE have come a long way but aren’t quite there yet for different reasons. The former goes too far with minimalism (outstripping even Apple in some ways) and KDE has just enough idiosyncrasies and lingering rough edges to be offputting to users who are uninterested in desktop tinkering.

To help address this at some point I’d like to build a DE that’s a near-clone of the XP/7 desktop as well as one that clones macOS (both classic and modern). These would make switching more painless and would eventually become very stable due to targeting fixed feature sets with development being focused solely on optimization and bug fixing once feature-completeness is achieved.

I think it would be more impactful if you contribute to Linux Mint and Elementary. The former reminds me of Windows 7 and the latter is a MacOS lookalike.

Elementary is a non-starter because even if it resembles macOS aesthetically, it’s more like GNOME or iPadOS in how it eschews a proper menubar in favor of hamburger menus or removing functions that don’t fit in the toolbar altogether. It’s also missing number of other power user oriented features like a GUI for modifier key and per-app key shortcut remapping.

Mint/Cinnamon are nice but I think its ties to GTK+ and various GNOME components are a liability.

It seems like you already have a list of pain points you can improve on.

Not if those "improvements" go against the desired grain by gnome/etc maintainers.

If I'm not misremembering, the gnome team is especially notorious for being closed to changes that go against their desired design goals.

Trying to get changes upstream like what the parent was suggesting would be somewhere between arduous and impossible, let alone being a pain to implement.

Edit: case in point: https://theevilskeleton.gitlab.io/2023/01/05/on-the-gnome-pr...

I use KDE plasma without any customization and I find it perfect. What "tinkering" is required according to you ? I even found the defaults super powerful. I got a notification on my NVMe having a failure, and I wouldn't have thought of this if it didn't show it to me.

Nothing major, just lots of little differences from Windows that in aggregate are enough to bother a lot of people.

Not really a KDE thing but having multiple screens with differing refresh rates is a pain on all distros I've tested. Either you add a lot of buffering to avoid screen tearing, or you get screen tearing.

I use KDE Plasma on Fedora, Wayland, and it works in the latest kernels. I remember it was an issue for me before, but now I have my laptop screen (120Hz) and desk screen (60Hz) working well.

For me it's stuff like the size of toolbars. They are too small and i tried a bunch of scaling before but couldn't get it right. The size of borders is also an issue where it seems like theres a few pixels i need to grab onto to resize a window so its difficult to do. Recently i ran into an issue in Nautilus where it doesn't auto refresh the contents of a folder when files are added, and there's no refresh button in sight either - you have to know the shortcut is F5. There's just a lot of tiny issues like that that keep cropping up. Then linux people will say "oh it works for me" and that's the end kf of the discussion.

There are also plenty of apps like Unreal or Davinci that while supported on linux tend to be more buggy just because they have a smaller user base and less investment by companies.

Yes, I get you, I also sometimes run into tiny issues when I try to shape the things how I want to be. That's why I kind of abandoned this mindset, and use as many defaults as possible. If I use KDE, I'd use the default file browser etc. I'd use the default functionalities and shortcut provided... I still run into some annoying issues (like, can't properly write with the korean characters).

For apps that "should" run on Windows (game, game dev, or other stuf), I'd just boot Windows yeah. Honestly it's so much time gained in just running the stuff how it's intended to be. As a bonus, I think it forces your brain to "adapt" to the stuff you have in hand (which sadly means that yeah, you won't be a power user most likely)

If reading/writing files isn't that slow across the host Windows and WSL, I would agree that Windows is the best Linux.

I've definitely joked that WSL makes Windows the most popular Linux DE.

My parents use Linux for daily browsing and general computer usage. My dad is pretty computer savvy but all his experience is with DPS and Windows. Since I convinced them to switch, they haven't needed to learn much about Linux to use ubuntu & debian on a daily basis (for almost 10 years now.) My mom knows virtually nothing about computer internals but she's at least been a desktop computer user since the days of DOS. I rarely get support calls from them about Linux problems. It's solid and reliable.