> a horrible mishmash of apps and programs and nothing integrates really well long term (story of life on a Linux desktop, really)

I used to use i3. Even now I've mostly moved to Cinnamon via KDE (which I abandoned as Plasma made my laptop fans spin too much, maybe user error? I never solved it) I haven't "settled" on anywhere and never really felt either was good enough to commit to. Obviously you don't have to commit, but you end up kind of unmoored. Especially as a lot of GNOME apps seem somewhat lacking so I often end up using, say, Okular or XReader rather than Evince, or CuteCom rather than whatever the GNOME serial terminal is. And I also gave up on vim as an editor so I don't really even have a "home" editor other than VS Code which is just kind of default. Plus a bunch of Windows only industrial and East Asian software the only works via a VM which is pretty clunky.

I used to use Macs at work and while I never really loved the experience (and certainly not that of fiddling with kernel drivers) and write keenly felt the metaphorical guards watching from the towers, it really did feel like a thought-through experience for a normal computer user.