I like Cosmic because it’s a nice middle ground between something like sway and the more mature DEs (Gnome/KDE). The tiling experience is phenomenal but you can still use floating if you prefer. I have it on both my main machine (Gentoo) and my secondary (Fedora).

The WWW was already over a decade old when Maddox was popular and the internet itself was 30+ years old at that point.

This right here. Almost all of your concerns are Windows-specific. Linux package management is light years ahead of windows.

I’m not using Pop! but I am loving cosmic on both Gentoo and Fedora.

On my potato I’m using sway.

Gentoo and Fedora for workstations although I’m thinking of switching my last Fedora machine to gentoo. Debian for servers but I’m wanting to learn alpine as well.