Funny, I was also one of those people who switched from E to WindowMaker. At the time I had no idea it resembled NeXTStep, but it was great.

After that I changed to KDE 3 which was a major milestone at the time. I think GNOME at the time was technically superior though.

Then shortly after I realized that desktop on Linux wasn't really going anywhere, so I switched to macOS (OS X at the time).

Kind of similar story, eventually I ended up on GNOME, as I favoured Gtkmm over how KDE was at the time, but then GNOME 3.0 happened, and my travel netbook got migrated into Unity, and when it went away, XFCE.

Due to similar realisation, my main working devices became Window 7 with Virtual Box/VMWare Worstation, nowadays WSL.

> At the time I had no idea it resembled NeXTStep, but it was great.

I used (and still use) Window Maker for almost a decade before learning what NeXTSTEP actually was (i heard about the name occasionally but never looked into it), then for several years before even trying one. I remember having a heavy sense of uncanny valley because the thing in front of me looked almost exactly like what i was using for years but it behaved in very odd ways (and lacked most of the window management features i came to expect) :-P. It made me realize what people who were used to Mac OS X felt when they tried the various Aqua GNOME/KDE themes that were popular on Linux desktops some years ago.