For UI/UX, you get to choose your DE if you want. Find something you like. KDE is very Windows-like, but with the ability to customize it if there’s things you don’t like.
As for the rest of your issues, literally I have never had an issue with them. Gaming is also perfectly fine without fucking around now, with very few exceptions (like Valorant that wants a rootkit). Also, no all the pieces on Windows weren’t designed to work together. For example, each individual app has to check for its own updates when it runs, which is the worst time to update, and you have to go to a website to download an updater. A package manager just a handles it all for you, because they’re designed to work together unlike Windows.
I don’t know about your actual competency with Linux/computers-in-general. I don’t want to make assumptions, but you really don’t seem to know what you’re doing. If Windows has less cognitive load, then you’re doing something wrong. You should experiment with other options and find what works for you.
I do know about window managers, thanks.
And that’s part of the problem: they all have their own slightly different infrastructure that relies on slightly intricate and not-quite-standard plumbing.
Dialogs not opening, or those weird invisible 30-second timeouts opening an application becasue dbus isn’t happy because one of the xorg init scripts messed some XDG path or set the wrong GTK_* option, or XAUTHORITY is pointing somewhere weird.
Whichever user is logged in locally should be allowed to talk to the device they plugged in via usb? Well that’s just an unreasonable thing to expect to happen by default, let me spend 20 minutes cooking up a udev script to chown it on creation.
Users managing to set their default terminal to some random script they were working on (seriously, how?). Or they initialised their xfce4 profile with the blank-toolbar option and now can’t work out how to launch anything.
Notification popups? Sure, the toolbar will let you add one, but nothing communicates with it by default lol.
also jesus christ kde.
And I’m talking about the built-in functionality of the desktop environment wrt package management, not separate applications.
Sure, it’s nice to be able to apt-get upgrade and just get everything all at once - when everything is happy with everything else.
But when you get conflicting dependencies and you have to take time out to track down what libpyzongo0-util is used for or what is going to break later on if you just purge it because people use cutesy package names that are worse than Ruby libraries in terms of communicating what they’re actually for, and do we need this thing for the core platform or it it form some random crap that was installed ad-hoc and used precisely once, it gets old.
Like I say you need this amount of flexibility and complexity for development and deployment and network services and all the rest. Anyone using Windows for much more than file-print-office-browser-gaming has more masochism in them than I can comprehend.
But for that same very minimal set of core use-cases, you don’t need (or, I’d argue, want) flexibility or complexity, you want it to be simple and robust with JOWTDI. And for everything else, you ssh into your linux box and do it there. I was amazed to discover that Windows Terminal is actually really nice; combine that with an X server and maybe a VNC client, and you’ve got the best of both worlds.
And yes, Windows has all kinds of annoying shit of its own - but that mostly pops up when you want to do interesting things on it, not when you just want to look at cat videos on the internet.
