And polish. With X you can sometimes feel the “layers” separating and slip-sliding around a bit in places that you don’t with a Wayland DE or in macOS. This was especially true in the late 00s when there was less computing power available to brute-force these issues into being less apparent.
As someone not very familiar with Linux, which desktop environment would you recommend with most “polish”? I’m thinking of switching from windows 10 on my new laptop but I do appreciate all the animations in windows. (I could also consider a hackintosh or BSD if they are prettier, especially in movement/animations.)
BSDs aren’t going to be functionally different from Linux in terms of desktop prettiness/animation as the two run the same DEs.
GNOME is probably the most polished in terms of aesthetics, animations, and gestures. The downside is that it’s much more a tablet OS experience with a few desktop affordances — kind of like iPadOS if it were turned into a desktop OS — than it is a traditional DE. As such expect for various power user features to be diminished or absent compared to macOS or Windows. Pantheon also ranks highly here, with similar limitations.
KDE comes in second. Compared to GNOME it still has a number of rough edges in terms of aesthetics but is comparable to Windows in terms of overall capabilities and design.
Third would be Cinnamon, which attempts to blend a more Windows-like desktop with GNOME-like polish, but last I knew this project is understaffed which has resulted in it falling behind a bit. Also requires X11, unlike GNOME and KDE which work well with Wayland.
