To be fair, Microsoft pre-Windows 8 was really good in term of desktop UI, arguably the best though you might prefer MacOS if you are into the Apple ecosystem.
Copying Microsoft is not a bad thing, even if some purists dislike it. And I say that as someone who uses a minimal Debian with Window Maker, X11 and no DE. When other see my environment, they call me crazy, and it is not as if I was using some keyboard-only tiling window manager. Crazy is not great for general adoption.
Despite all that, you can still be crazy. X11-based distros still exist, Wayland doesn't prevent you from having minimal window managers. It is a bit complicated at the moment because compositors need to do a lot more than window managers, but thanks to efforts like wlroots, things are improving. I am not a fan of Wayland, but it is not so broken as to make it impossible to use anything but GNOME or KDE. I wish we could work with it instead of against it, but in 16 years, it looks like they are starting to get something usable.
"The masses" may be living on cell phones, but not everyone with a desktop computer is a UNIX greybeard. Plenty of people don't even work in tech. Accountants, artists, gamers, etc... they could all benefit from a Windows-like Linux desktop.
Copying Microsoft is not a bad thing, even if some purists dislike it. And I say that as someone who uses a minimal Debian with Window Maker, X11 and no DE. When other see my environment, they call me crazy, and it is not as if I was using some keyboard-only tiling window manager. Crazy is not great for general adoption.
Despite all that, you can still be crazy. X11-based distros still exist, Wayland doesn't prevent you from having minimal window managers. It is a bit complicated at the moment because compositors need to do a lot more than window managers, but thanks to efforts like wlroots, things are improving. I am not a fan of Wayland, but it is not so broken as to make it impossible to use anything but GNOME or KDE. I wish we could work with it instead of against it, but in 16 years, it looks like they are starting to get something usable.
"The masses" may be living on cell phones, but not everyone with a desktop computer is a UNIX greybeard. Plenty of people don't even work in tech. Accountants, artists, gamers, etc... they could all benefit from a Windows-like Linux desktop.