My experience of Linux (and Mac OS) has been the opposite; they are extremely painful to make usable.
Yes, I have to disable a lot of stuff to get Windows the way I like it. But that's still exponentially easier than having to add, install, or perhaps even buy a lot of stuff to maybe get Linux/Mac to behave kind of how I want it to.
Having been a longtime Windows user, an on/off Linux desktop user, and now primarily a Mac user, I really think it's just what you're used to. Each desktop environment has its own strengths and weaknesses, and trying to bend one to be like the other is going to end in frustration. The userland of each OS is sufficiently different that different desktop metaphors break in different ways when you try to port them. MacOS will never have a taskbar, Windows will never have a functional dock and system menubar, and Linux will never have a cohesive toolkit because it's too fragmented. But each has its strengths and the key to productivity is to work with the desktop as designed rather than against it.
My experience with paid independent Mac desktop apps (e.g. Little Snitch, Al Dente, Daisy Disk, Crossover, anything from Rogue Amoeba etc.) is that they try a lot harder to integrate well with the system than equivalent freeware apps on Windows. MacOS is definitely "missing" some features out of the box (per-app volume control?) but makes up for it with certain things largely being more seamless, especially with regard to drivers (in my experience).
I also miss Linux DEs some days for their extreme customization potential and low resource usage. But it's hard to achieve compatibility between the "best" applications of each DE and GTK and Qt have their own warts.
Just go with the flow, and if Windows jives with you then more power to you. I can't stand it anymore though.
> Having been a longtime Windows user, an on/off Linux desktop user, and now primarily a Mac user, I really think it's just what you're used to
I've also used all three OS's in anger and largely agree.
I like to call that sort of attitude YOSPOS, named after one of the technology-oriented subforums on Something Awful. It stands for "Your Operating System is a Piece Of Shit."
Which OS? Your OS, whichever one (the royal) You happen to be using at the time. They all stink for different reasons, and it's just a matter of which OS's annoyances you decide to put up with.
That said, good lord, Windows 11 has been rough. I actually don't mind most of the UI changes, but the AI psychosis and the general lack of stability has made Windows 11 one of the only versions of Windows I can remember that started mediocre and kept getting worse with updates instead of better.
Yes, I have to disable a lot of stuff to get Windows the way I like it. But that's still exponentially easier than having to add, install, or perhaps even buy a lot of stuff to maybe get Linux/Mac to behave kind of how I want it to.