The handful of popular DEs [0] are going to be much more polished and functional for like 99% of tasks, and nonexistent [1] for the other 1%. The OS settings are conveniently located in a sensibly organized system settings manager and it works great. Then you need to mount a network drive (temporarily or permanently) and simply cannot do so in a GUI. If you're comfortable dealing with that small handful of outlier tasks (and if you're here, you can probably manage), then they're all already there.

[0] I use KDE, but it's essentially true of all of them

[1] that is, they require the command line

IIRC in Thunar you just open a dialog and paste the connection string and you're done. Pretty much the same as in Windows but you don't need to execute some icky looking binary from some web page to e.g. get support for sshfs.

That was mostly just chosen as an example of something KDE lacks, but which feels like it should be possible to do in a UI. I have no doubt that Xfce has plenty of comparable examples.

But I was curious and looked up the process; it seems that Thunar can only temporarily mount a network drive. So it remains a good example of the kinds of things you can easily do in the UI in Windows or macOS and thus feel weirdly lacking in Linux.

I kind of disagree that it is done easily in Windows, network drives are pretty cursed everywhere in my experience.

But yeah, I'm a professional who lives in multiplexed terminals and none of the people who I've helped migrate to Linux were keen on NFS, CIFS, SMB and so on, so it's not like I have a solid grasp on the graphical tooling available for such things.

It has been much rarer for people to come back to me with problems after I've helped them move to Linux compared to the Windows users, though.

Dolphin can mount network drives just fine?

Yes, but I don't believe it can do so permanently. And by that I mean, solely through the UI, connect to a network drive and have it persist across reboots. You can do that in the Windows or Mac file explorers.

My initial comment muddied that complaint. You can do it transiently in the UI in Dophin.

Works for me, I have my nextcloud webdav saved there since I didn't want to deal with any client bloat. It's not only persisted across reboots, but persisted across platform upgrades (I run fedora KDE)

> The handful of popular DEs [0] are going to be much more polished and functional for like 99% of tasks, and nonexistent [1] for the other 1%.

Lol! You should try being a comedian.

"I haven't found anything for linux that feels as polished."

Really? In my experience you can go for pretty much anything and it will be more coherent and less buggy than the Windows shell.

Try Gnome or XFCE. As a bonus you'll be able to remap Caps Lock with ease.

This is straightforward with Powertoys (official config utility from Microsoft) on Windows.

Why do you think that? Have you ever done it?

Not OP, but yes it works. I've used the 'Keyboard manager' tool from Powertoys to remap CapsLock to Esc. Never had a problem with it.

OK, so I did this recently and it depends a lot on what software you're then running whether it works or not, and whether the keyboard will actually flip some Caps Lock switch somewhere regardless of being remapped.

ctrl2caps tends to break and activate Caps Lock, i.e. capital letters unless Shift is held.

This being Windows 11.

I've been on KDE for the past 2 years and it's been a great experience. I wiped Windows everywhere (impractical before).

I keep it installed on a secondary drive just-in-case but I haven't booted into it in months.

I've been using KDE for the last few years, it's been the most familiar experience.

I use the KDE Plasma Fedora. It feels basically like Windows 10.

Do you still have to download things called GNOME Hacks to change things that should have regularly accessible settings?

Huh ? TWM has features that Windows doesn't. Window management in Windows ended in Windows 10.

Many others have already replied and it is 6 days later, but I wanted to reply to say I am quite happy with the stock KDE Plasma 6 desktop. I use some themes, e.g. "Breeze AlphaBlack" gives a nice Win10-like pure black taskbar, lovely on OLED. But the rest is stock. It Just Works (tm).