What's a desktop manager? I know about desktop environments, of which there seem to be 4-5 for Linux, and I know about window managers, of which there are many, thankfully.

Please list the "10 main desktop managers" so I can familiarize myself with them. Thanks.

Haha, you've gotta love these armchair Linux critics man.

Indeed, call a person that sincerely tries for the last 3 months to move to Linux as a daily driver armchair critic.

I could live with slightly wooden DE, I could live with the fact that my speakers are buzzing while there are phones connected.

The only real dealbreaker is lack of decent file search in Linux. I want something that delivers the speed of search of Everything and has realtime update. No luck so far.

Have you looked into KDE? KDE has a pretty complex file search/tag system called Nepomuk: http://userbase.kde.org/Nepomuk

Nepomuk is indexer, and I am not sure it starts indexing on volume mount, also not sure if it is hooked into fnotify. Everything is reads straight from the NTFS journal - it is really smart little utility that has become my main launcher for everything. But I have not found current in development project that could be used like that - rlocate was closest but it is dead from 3 years.

Nepomuk is not the indexer, Strigi is. And Strigi has inotify support AFAIK.

EDIT: This is an older post, but I think it shows exactly that: http://www.afiestas.org/nepomuk-is-not-fast-is-instant/

My wife only needed one night to switch to Linux.

Yeah, you've never used KDE before.

Pretty clearly, too. Nepomuk+KRunner sounds like it would meet a large number of the criteria specified.

Sounds great to me! My girlfriend's Windows 8.1 laptop does about 50% of what I want from a desktop. My work provisioned MacBook Air and OS X does about 70% of what I want from a desktop.

I know that feeling. Thankfully, thats why I recently decided to get my hands dirty and help :)

And Windows does 100% of what you want from a desktop?

Nonsense. There are, at best, a handful of desktop environments targeted at daily desktop users: Unity, KDE, Gnome-Shell, maybe LXDE/Razor if you're being generous.

I've love to hear a single specific complaint about an experience you had with KDE that isn't "it was different from windows", especially given that it's the closest to the Windows daily interactions.

Unity, KDE, LXDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate, Gnome 3, and I have tried to just go with openbox and Tint2.

First - it is different than windows is absolutely valid complaint. Having to tweak muscle memory is highly unpleasant.

A single problem with KDE - windows key cannot be mapped to show the start menu without extension.

Second is that all the taskbars that I found for it were just worse than the windows one in multimonitor setup or ugly.

Also Alt+Tab worked inconsistently.

>A single problem with KDE - windows key cannot be mapped to show the start menu without extension.

AFAIK, that's an X limitation. Already fixed in KDE5/KF5/PW2. Very annoying though, I've retrained myself for Super+Space as my hotkey instead.

>Second is that all the taskbars that I found for it were just worse than the windows one in multimonitor setup or ugly.

Hm, not sure what's up there. My KDE setup is identical to my work Windows setup. Taskbar on each monitor with "start" menu button and the icon-only task manager. Then the panel on my main monitor has my sys tray. Other than obvious icon differences, it's damn near identical to Windows (at least the way 8.1 does the taskbar on all monitors).

>Alt+Tab worked inconsistently

o_0 in KDE? KDE's default alt-tab is identical to Windows's. In Gnome-shell, it acts like OS X's Cmd-Tab. But either way, you can tweak the window switcher to work exactly the way you like- include all windows, only restored windows, switch between apps or windows, etc, etc.

He probably never tried KDE or gave up after 5 minutes. I found that KDE's multi monitor setup is much better than Windows 7's, it's good to hear that in 8.1 you can have taskbars on every monitor.