Windows: Windows 11 is a mixed bag with some better design and some worse. Currently, it's a bit of a step backwards. Windows 10 is pretty ok though.
Ubuntu: I wouldn't say Ubuntu is in a better place now with Gnome than it was 5 years ago. It works well, but it doesn't have the cool factor that Unity did and is missing a lot of its features. Ubuntu Unity exists, but it's a little buggy and not as polished as back in the 16.04 days. You could always go KDE Plasma (or MATE if you're old school).
There's the rabbit hole of other Linux distributions, my favorite alternative being Arch. But depends on your tolerance for tweaking.
Fedora deserves a mention as a solid desktop alternative to Ubuntu. It ships very up-to-date packages but doesn't require as much tweaking as, say, Arch. The default 'spin' is GNOME but they provide excellent support for Plasma, Cinnamon, etc.
I also think dnf is a more powerful and easier package manager than apt.
This. Fedora is rapidly turning into what Ubuntu should have been, and is retaking its spot that Ubuntu took shortly after it came around. Ubuntu is turning into a legacy desktop, centered around tailoring Gnome to a Unity-esque desktop every release rather than embracing progress.
When Ubuntu 22.04 was released, I switched to Fedora for good. They get a GNOME distro right.
I switched from Windows to Fedora Linux on all of my machines about 2+ years ago and it's been great! I will never go back. I do keep a totally empty Windows install for one game that I can't play though (Escape from Tarkov).
I got tired of Mac, weird and forced UI choices, inflexibility, so much RAM use, and feeling like it slowed down 50% over a course of 2-3 years despite having a fixed set of software on it
Tried Windows 11, and despite really wanting to like it, it left an impression of utterly unbelievable level of unpolished and unfinished mess, with basic features missing (primarily taskbar related) and still, after all these years, just being a skin over ever-present (and still there) Win95-era dialogs. I understand Windows 8 keeping the old Control Panel and having a weird and weak replacement with a new skin for it in parallel, but come on, we've had Win 10 for years and Win 11 still hasn't moved a bit from that same crap?
Switched to Manjaro (Arch-based distro), and KDE Plasma, spent a couple of days tinkering and customizing and have never been happier with my quick, light, rock-solid, completely customizable and fancy environment, that served me impeccably for 1.5 years until I was too tempted with MBP 14. It is a great device hardware-wise, but Mac OS has been a definite leap back, and I would pay hundreds of dollars to be able to put my Linux on MBP with everything working.
I was going to say something similar. The same sort of complaints this author has about Mac OS could be made about Windows 11. Linux desktop environments are worse because they go through the same cycle of changes in half the time.
What we really want is design stability. We do want improvements but we don't want wholesale conceptual changes in our desktop environments every few years.
I'm a SWE, I've been a DBA and a sysadmin, and I've been using Linux on servers for a long time, but on the desktop I'm just a user who doesn't care to understand the inner workings of the stuff that's supposed to just work for me. This KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Cinnamon, X vs Wayland, Unity, MATE, Plasma, whatever GUI stuff is way too confusing and not worth my time. Just sticking to the default in Ubuntu doesn't help much when even that keeps changing a ton, which is unbelievable. Why do they get users accustomed to something only to swap it out?
I feel like I’ve got conflicting desires here. On one hand, I just want everything to work, and everything to stay the same, just like what you describe. On the other hand, there are a dozen or two dozen packages which I want always up to date. Most of them are development tools. Any distro which is good at one is bad at the other.
I'd expect that the most stable distro could run the latest versions of those tools too. Do the tools depend on the latest desktop environment or something?
The stable distro can run those tools, but how do I keep them up to date? I could mix a stable Debian base with specific tools from unstable, but my experience is that this sometimes results in problems.
I use opensnitch and eventually found the appropriate blocking rule for every time a snap is launched or appimage from some random mount path for the process.
Not sure what's wrong with using the established package management system instead of reinventing the wheel to distribute an app on your own binary system that you control - why?!?!
The goal is to be distro-agnostic, but I find that Flatpak and Snap both add more bloat than is worth it. Either just use distro packages, or, if you really want cross-platform, get an AppImage and be done with it.
Windows: Windows 11 is a mixed bag with some better design and some worse. Currently, it's a bit of a step backwards. Windows 10 is pretty ok though.
Ubuntu: I wouldn't say Ubuntu is in a better place now with Gnome than it was 5 years ago. It works well, but it doesn't have the cool factor that Unity did and is missing a lot of its features. Ubuntu Unity exists, but it's a little buggy and not as polished as back in the 16.04 days. You could always go KDE Plasma (or MATE if you're old school).
There's the rabbit hole of other Linux distributions, my favorite alternative being Arch. But depends on your tolerance for tweaking.