I am saying this as a very long time Linux user, and it saddens me. Politics aside, from a pure technical, functional, privacy and UX perspective, the case for changing over from Windows has been apparent for several decades.

If you picked XFCE as your front end you get WinXP functionality, with the nice things from win10/11 (start menu search that's actually local only, multiple desktop workspaces, and graphical settings/updates I've only needed to go to command line twice in four years).

How does XFCE compare to KDE and GNOME? Also, does it has all the nice window snapping features that I'm used to fron Windows?

As a long time Linux user, this comment makes me sad since many of those features were copied from Linux (many from Unity) :)

Unity really was a great project.

KDE 6.6 is great to me, but there are some quirks I have found. Their "peek at desktop" feature is annoying, I want "minimize all" but you have to do some scripting to enable that.

I've noticed that clicking the network button to see wifi status shows traffic rate, and that seems to lag and I suspect it has an impact on throughput.

I'm interested in Cosmic when it matures some more.

I think most of its features predate unity (compiz was integrated but existed before)

I don't think all the same shortcuts exist out of the box, although win-drag/win-right-drag to move and resize windows (might be alt by default) is _so_ much more convenient than the usual border/title dragging that you might find you don't miss them.

My personal PCs have enough screens that I haven't tried. Though I do really like Windows snapping features on my work laptop (can't change OS there).

I haven't played with other windowing systems to judge too much. And just picked right from screen shots/gifs to not need to try.

Except when I recently put XFCE on my old macbook air laptop as a trial run, within the first day I found it nearly impossible to do something so simple as add an application to the taskbar/dock. Something about AppPkg's not showing up by default in the taskbar adder? I finally figured it out, but no icon - just an invisible square. And guess what? If I decide the update the app, the whole thing breaks again.

I have a degree in a tech-related field. I do things on the command line on purpose every week. It should not be this hard even for me to so something so simple. It is not even remotely ready for regular joe end users.