My 6 weeks of trying Linux Distibutions

[axur-delmeria]

Just tweak xfce, you can do all with it, nothing forces you to have double bars. All can be tweaked until it s no longer XFCE, but it is you XFCE is my own DE of preference as it has all DE features to avoid frustrating you, and can be tweaked endlessly while being very light as DE!

That's exactly what I do: tweak Xfce and Thunar till I get comfy with it. I tested MATE on a recent Debian install, but while it tried to look and act like Windows, it fails badly in many aspects: basic things like showing the shutdown menu with Alt-F4 when there are no open windows, somehow being unable to assign Win+E to launch the file manager, the Brisk Menu Launcher not being fully keyboard-navigable, etc. Would probably convert it to Xfce when I have more free time.

[TRS-80]

First thing I always do is get rid of that second, bottom panel in XFCE. I mean, I guess they put it there for discoverability, or to make those coming from Apple more comfortable maybe?

I found jdk's little UI history lesson enlightening (even though I was aware some of it). I think most people (well, certainly desk/laptop power users, perhaps including most of us here on these forums) would agree that Gnome 3 was a disaster. It is true that the vast majority of devices nowadays are phones/tablets. However I do not think it follows that those (relatively) fewer remaining desktop (power) users want a mobile UI on their desktop.

So here is where I find phosh (phone shell)[0] interesting, because it goes the opposite direction from Gnome 3 and others who tried "mobile UI everywhere" in the past. Phosh is a library that takes an existing desktop program, and gives you tools to adapt the UI "down" to mobile (instead of the other way around). Which I just think is a much better approach.

[0] The only reason I even know about this is because I have been following GNU/Linux phone (PinePhone / Librem 5) development fairly closely for some years now.

[axur-delmeria]

@TRS-80
Removing Xfce's bottom panel is the first thing I do. Next is move the top one to the bottom, customize, and autohide.

@jdk
Thanks for the UI history lesson.

Personally I don't like Vista's Start Menu, especially because it ate up a lot of screen space compared to Win95/2000, but got used to it in 7, even though keyboard navigation was a mess. The built-in search was nice though.
I loathe Win8's full screen Start Menu, and 10's incessant ads (which you had to manually remove), inadequate keyboard navigation, flat window/button scheme, are just as bad.

[farmall]

Another happy xfce user of many years here, which I particularly like as I use multiple displays. I find Xubuntu convenient as I'm long past the exploration stage and use my machines as tools.

BTW distrohopping is easily done in VMs and places like obsboxes.org have a wide variety of prebuilts for free download. If you like one it's easy to copy your /home to a bare metal install.