For the Windows look and feel, I recommend Mint + Cinnamon. It took me about 15min to not miss anything on Windows and was shocked how I had forgotten how clean a system can be.

Mandatory Windows accounts can still be circumvented with a console command for Win 11 installations, but the overall enshitification package just got worse and worse.

Cinnamon is X11, but it works very well.

Yeah I love KDE especially because it doesn't force a certain look and feel, it's super configurable out of the box and even more if you install themes and plugins (which I don't even do).

> Mandatory Windows accounts can still be circumvented with a console command for Win 11 installations

Heard that's patched too

Did it the day before yesterday with a fresh win11 image from Microsoft (no rufus magic or anything). You can press shift + f10 and run a command I don't remember. It restarts the install process and lets you create a local account while it still patches the system before the first start (no fiddling with internet connections required). At least that still works.

At least for an install in vbox under Mint :)

oobe\bypassnro it is.

But there's been some talk about them removing it though there was a more cryptic one as a replacement. Still seems to work on recent versions though.

It was in insider builds yes but it still seems to be 'live' in production builds.

The writing is on the wall though.

> Cinnamon is X11, *so* it works very well.

FIFY

Is that still the case on Linux as well?

I'm on FreeBSD and yes there's still many bugs and nasties in Wayland. It works technically but it's not great, at least alongside KDE.

But I thought on Linux it was a lot further along now.