But how many of those meet the criteria of not being based on corporate distros and are also user friendly? For instance, I wouldn’t exactly classify Gentoo as user friendly.

I think people naturally tend toward the servers of the people that started the project and also the servers that have the most people on them. As the federated technology continues to smooth out I think more people might be more comfortable spreading out to other servers.

Personally I started out on the Beehaw server but they had some rules I didn’t like so then I found another server.

The way I would handle things is first I would look for a native Linux version, and if that wasn’t available, then I’d try to use Wine / Proton, and if it didn’t work that way either, then I’d look at streaming it through a service like GeForce Now. It would be easiest to have a separate drive with Windows on it but now that Microsoft is turning Windows into ad-filled spyware more than ever before, especially with Windows 11, I’d rather use one of the above options instead.

I’d even be tempted to get a Mac Mini to handle the software that wouldn’t work with one of the above options rather than use Windows.

These days I mostly use Manjaro, though I’ve been thinking of giving the Suse rolling release a try.

You might be looking for a KDE desktop. Many of Windows’s better more modern desktop features are copied from it, and KDE is very customizable out of the box without needing to install a bunch of extensions like you do with Gnome. KDE can be customized to fit many different desktop paradigms, with the default being like Windows 10.