There’s a pretty good video on YouTube that details it’s failure. The Russians also had something similar and I think they where more successful at it. youtu.be/pW0eZRoQ86g?si=4JCqtCmS1mMLDOve
I think you brought up a good point in that Microsoft conditions people to expect a certain behavior from their PC. Some of that is ease of use at there expense of privacy, forced unavoidable updates, and individual software solutions that handles their respective updates.
I bounce around a lot, mainly between Qtile and Awesome WM because I like how it handles multiple monitors. You should check it out, there’s loads of premade configs on GitHub.