Yeah, I didn't mean to write a "Linux is better" polemic, just that building my own Linux desktop works better for me. I also haven't used Gnome since ~2009 except briefly to discover that Gnome 3 was trash. Unity was a travesty and I also hated it when Ubuntu force fed me that.

You're right. Locking yourself into a distro, especially the more user-friendly ones, can get you into just as much of a dictatorship as macOS.

I use i3 on X11 like a neanderthal and mostly Qt/KDE apps. I'll switch to Sway and Wayland when things stop working.

I'd switch if I were you - well, I did, after holding out for what I thought was a long time. A lot of minor nuisances I hadn't gotten around to investigating with X just disappeared, I think you'd find that by comparison you were/are actually nearer 'not working' than you realise, my sway experience has been much smoother.