I use GNOME and I enjoy it a lot. If you decide to go with GNOME, imho try to install as few extensions as possible so that you can experience the desktop environment the way it’s intended by the developers. Of course, if it’s not for you, then with the help of extensions you can adapt it to your liking.

Pros:

• Beautiful to look at and gets out of the way. GNOME scored great productivity gains for me.
• Fast, responsive and very stable (I’m on Fedora 40).
• Great experience with flatpaks.
• The best touchpad gestures in the world. Any DE, any OS.

Cons:

• Even though it is very stable, sometimes it crashes. Last time the crash was caused by Thunderbird; then I switched Thunderbird to flatpak too, so that if it crashes again it will not bring down the whole DE (applause to flatpak for delivering the tech 👏). Disclaimer: prior to the crash, I haven’t shut down / restart my laptop for 20 days… it might not be Thunderbird alone that caused the problem.

🚧⚠️ That said, there’s currently a really annoying bug in GNOME that causes HUGE (or even - INSANE!) disk I/O! I don’t know when it is going to be fixed, but for the first time in two years this made me consider trying other desktop environments.

Here are my “two cents” on the topic.

1. Do your best to try as much FOSS alternatives to your software stack while you’re still on Windows. If you do this, then you will know what to expect on Linux in terms of workflow. Linux is much faster than Windows; also it’s free from advertising and data-mining… your computer will fly in terms of performance. However, this will be useless if you cannot accomplish your work.

• 1.1. If there is software that you cannot find an alternative for, consider running under Linux a Virtual Machine with Windows; check your computer’s hardware - if it’s on the higher end, then you will not have any problems with that.

2. Pick a distribution that matches your computing preferences. Some Linux distributions are on the bleeding edge (like Arch), others are on the leading edge (like Fedora and Ubuntu non-LTS), and then you got those on the dinosaur-edge (like Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu LTS, openSUSE Leap) who are ment for enterprise deployment and feature ultimate stability with older software packages in their repositories. Personally, I like to be on the leading edge, but with a decent level of stability. I achieve this with Fedora by staying on the previous release and upgrading to the next one 1-2 months before mine reaches end of life. Why? I simply don’t have time for bullsh#t, i.e. dealing with bugs, tinkering my system and so on. When I need the latest version of a program, I get it from Flathub.
3. Pick a desktop environment. In my opinion, GNOME and KDE are the best, and you can discard all the other options. That said, XFCE scores great when you run some big data workloads or similar processes, where every bit of RAM matters. Apart from such use cases, idk why anybody would use anything else than GNOME or KDE.
4. Always keep in mind that nothing in this world is perfect, y inclus Linux. When there’s something wrong with Linux, don’t judge it harshly and remember what this system gives you in terms of efficiency and freedom. Always keep a backup of your important files. Data storage is dirt cheap nowadays.
5. Don’t mind salty people and haters inside the Linux community. As in every community, there are those no-life people who are so obsessed with something that they are actively fighting for it and insulting others for whatever they think it’s important. No matter what whoever says, your system is yours and you should use it the way it suits your needs.