Many Linux users seem to like upgrading (if you can call it that) to the latest eye candy every time Gnome or KDE or whoever puts out a new release. I'm the opposite. I do think much of the UI work in Linux has done more harm than good. But that's the nice thing about Linux: I don't have to care, precisely because of the lack of such close coupling between the GUI and the underlying OS. I can't stand the GUI that comes by default with Ubuntu, but I just don't use it; I use something else instead.
I felt the same as you, up until quite recently, although I was using Xbuntu which uses a very barebones desktop environment. Since changed to CachyOS + KDE Plasma late last year and haven't booted up Windows for 3 months other than to extract a few files. I"m a MacOS laptop user, Windows desktop user, but these days I much prefer CachyOS for speed, responsiveness, easy customisation. You may still find you prefer Windows but it's worth a revisit I think and easy to try via a USB Boot as you know (although running it off USB is way more sluggish I find).
I can’t place my finger on it, but Bazzite feels more “coherent” despite using the exact same GUI.
I had the misfortune of using a Windows 11 machine the other day and I didn’t even recognise it. They’ve taken a huge misstep with the Copilot rollout.
You really should, yeah. I've given up Linux as a daily driver in favor of a MacBook but I do have a work mandated Windows machine and I hate that thing with a passion. I cannot think of a single thing that's better on it than on my MacBook or any Linux distro I've ran as a daily driver.
In fact, most of the time I want to do any tasks which are not directly Teams or MS office related I find it easier to just use WSL.
But every Linux distro has its own UI, and pretty much every distro makes it easy to configure it to look how you want, with tens of thousands of themes out there developed over the past 20 years by people wanting their os to look a certain way.
The most glaring inconsistencies are going to be user-inflicted. If I spend a weekend tweaking defaults to look just right I need to be ok with possibly tweaking any new software I download to fit my theme.
But even from a non-power-user perspective, if my mom runs into problems with her computer it's much easier to walk her through a fix over the phone if she's on Windows or a Mac.
My dad, who is very tech-literate, once tried Linux and all the trouble shooting guides required him to open a command prompt (because there isn't a consistent GUI you can use to fix things across distros). He never forgave it.
You can run KDE but depending on the app and containerization you open you'll get a Qt environment, a Qt environment that doesn't respect the system theme, random GTK apps that don't follow the system theme, random GTK apps that only follow a light/dark mode toggle. The GTK apps render their own window decorations too. Sometimes the cursor will change size and theme depending on the window it's on top of.
Right up until you try to access any settings menus.