I haven’t tried Linux in a while and only really played around with XFCE and Cinnamon and reviving my old laptops, but I’ve just tried KDE Plasma and GNOME for a bit and DAMN they look good. Modern looking and not the weird Mica effect that Windows has. Very clean!
They both look great and I wouldn’t say one looks better than the other, just preference probably, just that GNOME looks more bubbly + rounded + bit like MacOS in a good way and Plasma looks more blocky + similar to Win10 taskbar
The touchscreen buts still appear to need a bit of work, on both Plasma and GNOME I made it freeze. For Plasma I opened the launcher button and tried to use the onscreen keyboard, and it kept on opening and closing very quickly, for GNOME I did the three finger swipe up gesture and everything became unresponsive. Also, Bluetooth weirdly doesn’t work on KDE but does on GNOME. Huh. Maybe just my device?
I really want to switch soon, maybe during the holidays I’ll get round to it :D
edit: I think it’s pretty crazy that a relatively small team (compared to the likes of Microsoft) can offer such a good UI and overall user experience! That’s insane! The people who help make the distros are doing very good work and I wish them the best of luck! Hopefully the weird quirks and compatibility issues will iron out and Linux becomes mainsteam :D
Definitely worth playing around with either on bare metal like an old laptop or something, maybe in the holidays like you mention. I switched to Linux on my main gaming PC a year and a half ago, and just installed EndeavourOS (with Plasma) on my new Framework laptop
I’ve installed Ubuntu on both of my old laptops but they are so old that I can’t effectively daily drive them (they are heavy, thick, terrible screen, battery is dead, etc)
I’m thinking of switching to Linux for my newer laptop, but I want to wait until the holidays. Hopefully the bugs around touchscreens will be fixed soon!