The problem with linux hasn't been the GUI for a long time, even 20 years ago you had flashier GUI than win / mac. Personally I don't care about GUI and just run i3 with shitty looking dialogs.

The problem with linux has been either hardware compatibility or when things don't work it's a pain to figure it out however I have good news on that front! For the life of me I've never managed to send audio to my monitor / TV speakers when running linux but now with Gemini I've managed to finally fix it. So if you're scared about things breaking and spending hours inside man pages.. just copy paste your console into an LLM and it'll probably help you out.