[hotpathdev]

[GNU/]Linux.

I should be able to stop there, but I understand that if you never really gave Linux a shot, or you tried one distro once and gave up when the first thing broke, then you didn't get a chance to learn anything about Linux at all. If that's you, try Linux Mint next time. It's a good beginner distro, you won't break it easily, you will be able to google solutions easily and after a few months you will have learned enough to try other distros. It's important to start with a stable beginner distro to have the "things that work on linux desktop" benchmark.

Here's another thing you need to know about Linux: The look and feel of your Linux desktop is not locked-in. All those reviews you read about a Linux distro that talked about the look or feel, are actually just misleading. The look and feel are distro-independent for the most part.

Linux desktops are as customizable as you want them to be [1], or as little as you want them to be. GNOME and KDE are not the only game in town, XFCE is also a solid out-of-box minimalist experience which is very much like old-windows. If you want to boost productivity, tiling managers are waiting for you. You can also install all of them at once and switch at the login screen. Even the login screen is something you can customise or swap out.

[1] https://teddit.net/r/unixporn