Just to clarify, it's not about "vintage experience". Xfce is deceptively simple - it gets out of your way and let you do whatever you wish. The original settings are sensible as they are, but you also can customize it as you wish. It is pretty un-opinionated.

As a user I don't care about X11 / Wayland. I mean I do, from the security viewpoint, but not otherwise. Xfce could port itself to Wayland and (if done properly) I wouldn't even notice. It is nice to know that on any Linux machine I can install UI desktop environment which is usable, dependable and... complete.

I love Xfce and hope they never change. Kudos to everyone involved!

As I said, I have my own list of things with linux I would like to see different, it's just that they are different. And they are not big enough to keep me in MS-land. But to each their (our) own, I guess.

- There is nothing wrong with sudo - or to be precise, it is good thing that administrative operations are explicit. And sudo is still less annoying than Windows "admin prompt" anyway.

- Why do you care? Use apt install, yum install or apk add, whatever your distro supports.

- It is not required, there are GUI managers, but again - why?

- Got me there. I don't use pen.

- Used touch on ThinkPad some years ago, it just worked, maybe depends on the laptop?

- Until 15 years ago this was true, but I haven't seen this happen since then. Debian here if it matters.

- I'm typing this on a 15 years old desktop (with NVME, admittedly) and it boots and feels faster than a new MacBook Pro I am testing. Linux accumulated much less, if any, performance losses. I agree that Windows and Mac both became bloated.

- I think doubleclick is the default way, at least in xfce? Or I might be missing what you mean. That said, I use keyboard shortcuts mostly as I try to avoid mouse for this.

With all that said, of course it will not look and feel the same as Windows. It is a different OS, with different priorities. I like it better than both Windows and MacOS, but maybe it's because I found the combination that fits me (Debian + XFCE). Maybe take a look at KDE and XFCE?

Also, if someone is using this in production: any gotchas?

I'm sure in time the technology will evolve and there won't be a new car on the road that wouldn't support FSD - just like it did with "horseless carriages". It will take some more time though and not all companies will be equally advanced. From what I've heard (from other sources too) I wouldn't want to be driven by a Tesla FSD at the moment.

> * horseless carriages won't avoid running into things whereas horses can see and instinctively won't run into a wall

Off topic, but interesting - if you think about it, we actually already had mostly-FSD in the 1890s. It just ate a whole lot of grass.

> ...this may have come also from my interest in psychology, who knows...

Do you have a good recommendation where to start for someone who had zero interest during school years, but is now curious?

> ...for various reasons, including security concerns.

Security is just a red herring.

Who wins with this move? The cynic in me (who is usually annoyingly right) says Google. Mozilla loses even more trust from its users and Firefox now has a tool to disable ad blockers on websites of their biggest competitor^Wsponsor if they reach a suitable mutual agreement (read: G pays enough for it). Win-win for all the parties that have a say in this. Not users of course, but that's life.

So it's your vendor who doesn't care about backwards compatibility - Linux does. Whatever hardware you have, once it was supported, it will stay this way until it is really ancient, and even then you will have special builds that will support it. That's the beauty of open source (or even source available) licenses. No corporate interests that would render your solution obsolete. [0]

[0] assuming your hardware doesn't need some binary blobs (khm nvidia khm) to work

It looks we are making a huge progress in that direction, with very similar problems arising.

Even with some improvements, git UI sucks to this day. Linus didn't care much about the chrome and had a special aversion against anything that smelled of SVN, including the names of the commands that actually made sense. And the worst thing is that Subversion wasn't even half bad - it was just bad for Linux kernel development. Most companies could easily use it today (and some still do).

Additionally, Mercurial with its consistent UI is/was (imnsho) far superior to Git. Git won mostly because GitHub was lightyears ahead of everything else (and in many ways still is), not because git is any way better than hg.