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.