> Windows is out of the question for me due to not being a POSIX-based OS.
Cygwin.
> I experimented with using a mostly stock Xubuntu setup for a bit and also found the user experience to be really subpar.
Did you try any other DE such as Cinnamon, mate, KDE or one of the many others?
Though I feel my recommendations will fall on deaf ears as I have the feeling you're one of those devs that doesn't want to put in the effort to learn a new platform and thus will ignore any and all advice and go back to whatever abusive platform they are familiar with. I get it, time is precious and you just want to get work done. But you cant complain about alternatives when you aren't willing to put in the effort to learn how to use them and help make them better. This isn't an insult mind you, just an observation.
I think if I were to try to make any DE work the way I'd like it to it would have to be my full-time job for a while for there to be any hope of it being finished any time this decade. The list of changes is huge irrespective of the DE used as a starting point, and the changes large enough that upstream probably wouldn't want them which brings the overhead of maintaining a fork.
Unfortunately, though it's a goal I'm working on, I'm not going to be in any shape to quit my job and start full-time tinkering on FOSS any time soon.
Time is very precious. As someone who's done the investment into both desktop Linux (Openbox) and MacOS, the level of effort required to get something useful is way different. MacOS has a very gentle learning curve so it's easy to switch and be back in business, getting work done. Linux OTOH is less of a learning curve and more of a learning cliff. I've got the exact right monitor setup I want on Linux, but it required learning xrandr and writing a shell script because none of the GUI frontends could get it right. With MacOS I kinda just have to accept whatever it gives me as good enough. Thankfully it usually is though.
Point is, because desktop Linux isn't a little bit of effort, it's a lot a bit of effort, so I can't fault anybody for not putting in the effort to learn it whilst there are viable alternatives. Which includes ChromeOS these days, to throw a curve-ball in there.
Cygwin.
> I experimented with using a mostly stock Xubuntu setup for a bit and also found the user experience to be really subpar.
Did you try any other DE such as Cinnamon, mate, KDE or one of the many others?
Though I feel my recommendations will fall on deaf ears as I have the feeling you're one of those devs that doesn't want to put in the effort to learn a new platform and thus will ignore any and all advice and go back to whatever abusive platform they are familiar with. I get it, time is precious and you just want to get work done. But you cant complain about alternatives when you aren't willing to put in the effort to learn how to use them and help make them better. This isn't an insult mind you, just an observation.