I've been using Pop!_OS for several months now. I first installed it at home on my desktop PC just to give it a try, and then I also installed it on my laptop alongside Windows right before going to Germany.
I use Pop!_OS as my main operating system right now for pretty much everything except gaming, which isn't yet as good as on Windows, and Netflix, because apparently Edge is one of the few browsers on which you can watch TV shows / movies at the highest quality.
I decided to use this OS for pretty much everything I do for a multitude of reasons. First of all, it seems to be faster than Windows, at least on my laptop. I'm not sure exactly why, but everything is just quicker on Linux on my current machine. I also like the ease with which I can install / delete things, not having to bother downloading anything, avoiding any bloatware that comes with whatever program I need, or having to manually close the program from Task Manager because some random process related to it keeps running even when I don't want it to.
I also keep discovering cool pieces of software that either I cannot find on Windows or, if I can find anything similar, isn't quite as good as whatever Linux offers. In this particular case one of the newest things I found that comes integrated into my system is a program called "KDE Connect" which links your computer to your phone and allows you to do a bunch of things with it such as file transfer, media control, sending messages, and so on.
I only discovered it a few days ago but I'm already in love with it. I've been looking for something like this for a very long time and I could never find anything good that just works. I tried the "Your Phone" app on Windows and it's just horrible. Not only that but it's implemented into the OS in a way that makes it run even when I stop it from task manager, hell, even when I go into "services" and I try to manually stop it from launching.
KDE Connect doesn't do anything of the sort. When I need to use it, it's there. It doesn't annoy me with random stupid notifications, unless I want it to, it doesn't get in the way, and it doesn't randomly consume my computer's resources without me wanting it. And it gets the job done - I can transfer files with no problem, control the music / videos I am watching from the desired device and send messages if I need to type a lot and quickly.
So yeah, I'm glad I found this little piece of software. Things such as these are one of the reasons I really like Linux at this moment. Sure, there are things that won't work as well as on Windows, but the opposite is true as well - there are things on Linux that don't work as well on Windows. This is why dual booting exists.
Anyway, that's it. No lesson here, no nothing. Just wanted to share a cool thing I discovered and maybe help others link their devices better with it. From what I understand now there's also a Windows version, so if you need something like this you can give it a try.
I experienced the same a few years ago, both on desktop PCs and on laptops too, when I used Ubuntu Linux. Nowadays I use a HP 15s laptop with Windows 11. I have not tried Linux on this so far. By the way, lightweight desktop environments on Linux can also make your PC faster. So you can find a lot of difference in speed between various Linux distributions.
I see them both as tools nowadays, and I use each for whatever it does best, so that I don't have to waste my time trying to do something on an OS that doesn't do it well. I game on Windows because it's flawless and I work on Linux whenever I don't need Photoshop. Whatever helps me do work faster.
On the desktop environment side I currently use Gnome simply because it's the default and I don't want to spend any time switching right now, because I don't really have enough of it. But I agree. A while ago I used XFCE and even I3 on my old computer and it made things run much faster simply because nothing else, except the things that I needed, was using the resources of my PC.