Congrats, that’s almost exactly how I felt when I switched a year or two ago. I did a bit of distro hopping after a few weeks, and quickly resettled on Bazzite, but it was a universal experience of stuff just working better without any bullshit I didn’t add myself.

There are 3 answers and only 3 answers:

• New and casual users: Mint.
• Gamers: Bazzite.
• Power users: just try a bunch and see which one(s) you like, you people are exactly why there’s are so many distros.

Mint or Fedora if you’re starting out. Bazzite if you want a more gaming focused version of Fedora. CachyOS if you want something more cutting edge.
Ubuntu is generally fine but functions at the whims of Canonical, who are both Linux weirdos and corporate weirdos, which leads to some interesting decisions.

You misunderstand me - are the police actually using the desktop environment, clicking menus and launching programs, or is the OS just a vehicle for them to run one program that covers all their tasks and duties? Because the commenter’s point was that people who are actually using the DE hate change, so your example will be irrelevant if the cops aren’t actually using the DE.

Are cops actually using the OS though, or is it just what their proprietary policing software runs on now? Last time I was in a cop shop in the UK they all seemed to be working through the same full screen interface, so the OS seemed irrelevant.

I tried it because even with most of the bloat disabled Microsoft still kept threatening to downgrade me to windows 11, so having heard most games were working through proton and knowing gimp and Firefox run natively I figured it was worth giving it a try.
I stayed because with KDE it feels like an “unlocked” windows, windows with all the annoying parts stripped out, delimited, or fixed. Installing it was simple, customising it was extensive and easy, games run better, GIMP loads faster, installing programs from the bazaar is trivial, and it doesn’t run into any more bugs and errors than windows did, so it’s just a net upgrade. Weirdly bugs are often easier to diagnose and fix with the help of a search engine too, because the questions and answers tend to be a lot more in depth and informative than you get with windows.