- Vista still had the old-fashioned tasbar without dock-like behaviour.
Wayland, especially with a laptop and/or a multi-monitor setup. It has a proper touchpad support with 1:1 gestures and setting different scaling factors for multiple monitors with different refresh rates is a breeze.
I don’t want to sound rude, but how old is your setup? Are you using a desktop or a laptop computer?
Because I’m daily driving a late 2015 Dell XPS 9350 and X11 just ain’t cutting it, even though the laptop is nearly a decade old. On X11, its trackpad would be garbage, GNOME’s animations would be stuttery, and fractional scaling would be a mess, because I have a docking station with a 75 Hz ultrawide monitor, meaning that I must utilise both 125% and 100% scaling factors, as well as 60 Hz and 75 Hz refresh rates and different resolutions. Sure, not everyone uses multi monitor setups, but those who do serious office tasks or content production work often cannot imagine their workflow without multiple monitors. Point is, X11 is to ancient to handle such tasks smoothly, reliably and efficiently.
Multiple displays only work as long as you have identical resolutions and refresh rates. Good luck mixing monitors with different scaling factors and refresh rates on X11.
Gnome 2 had virtual desktops
Unpopular opinion: Linux Mint sucks ass and there are so many great distros to choose from, which aren’t Linux Mint. It looks like Windows XP and functions like Windows XP. Still uses X11, which doesn’t even have proper support for 1:1 touchpad gestures and handles multiple displays with different scaling factors and refresh rates in a way that is, well, hacky and janky at best or non-functional at worst.
I get that Linux Mint is easy to use because it’s made specifically to be as convenient as possible to users coming from Windows but jeez, it looks and feels like something from 2005, especially on a laptop…