I too am very cautious of getting stuck with Linux. I try to be sure I’m not doing things the hard way. I have found easy distros and easy ways to do most things in Linux despite many people suggesting I do it the IT pro way that they do. Usually because they haven’t investigated easy ways for non IT users. They mean well, but don’t know about usability or if there us an easy way.

Windows doesn’t have a real choice of desktop environments. So I moved to Linux 15 years ago. I’m not in IT and always use a mouse. Importantly for me, I’ve never needed the CLI, despite people telling me that’s impossible. Plasma lets me tweak it to my needs. I use Kubuntu, yet don’t care about what’s below the desktop environment. Happy to change distros.

I install graphical and visual design apps. And I’ll navigate to the category by mouse. I don’t memorise the names of all my apps. I’m not in IT, and I’m not working with text all the time. I’ll right click the app icon and go ‘Add to favourites’, so I have a highly productive, 1 click access to important apps. I’m interested in usability, am not a beginner and I know my UI and settings well. I can see why people find this tiny green dot useful. It’s OK if you are not into usability. But note that there are many different user types, with different needs at different times. And the flexibility of KDE Plasma makes it a really great desktop environment.

sure. those are reasons it’s missing some stuff. But I was referring to other important things also missing from Windows. Which is what Linux seems to follow. Linux has a great opportunity to break away, and come up with something really good. But sadly, there will be reasons not to, I suspect.

AutoCAD might be widely used at the lower end, where many just create a sketch and extrude it. But that is no good for car or aircraft design, where you need high end smooth shape commands, and high productivity workflows.

Great. But AutoCAD and Solidworks are not high end CAD. Acceptable for some I guess. But we need serious CAD.

We have to use Windows at work for our high end CAD. There’s no FOSS alternative.

I use Linux at home. Which is basically a, less crap, copy of Windows. But is still missing important stuff.

Why not both? It’s simple to install both and decide for yourself. I use both for different tasks.

I’m also not a text first person. There are a lot of us about. I have found GUI applications to do most commands I need. Most IT users don’t know them, as they’ve never searched for them. I pin the apps as Favourites in the launcher, to help remember my processes. The apps typically keep the last used values, making them quite productive.

Get a spare computer. Then you will feel more inclined to mess with it. And your main computer is always ready to look up issues and set up boot USB sticks. You will definitely try out lots more distros without hesitation.

And there are some cool mini PCs to buy quite cheap.

In KDE Plasma, if you right click on the launch menu button, there is an option Show Alternatives. Here, you can immediately select and use one of the installed alternative start menus. On top of that, you can install further launcher menus, which will then appear in the Show Alternatives list. I installed Simple Menu (from Eike Hein) that has categories, favourites and search. And let’s you move the icons around. But its that easy to try out different launchers. I hope you find a good one.

Not at all.They are 2 ways do the same thing. The GUI can tell you what options are available. The CLI needs you to memorise them, or go somewhere else to look them up.