I got into computers when there was no GUI.
Then years later I got a Win95 PC and I found the Windows GUI pretty good - although the rest of the OS was not. My personal Linux PC running Slackware 96 came with FVWM95 wich was a good approximation. So I switched to that.
That was just for graphical utilities of course - of which there weren't very many. I spent the rest of my time in the Linux console or in xterm using screen for convenience.
Fast-forward to today: I still do that. I still like the Win95 UI paradigm, so I run Mint / Cinnamon. But most of what I do with it is open a Gnome terminal, blow it up and start tmux - like screen but better.
And, ya know, for almost 3 decades, whether it's Mint or anything else I used, that's pretty much what I've been doing: running screen in a terminal in a Win95-like GUI. And it works fine for me.
I recently ordered a laptop that comes with Debian / Wayland and the Sway window manager installed by default. I learned a long time ago that it's often better to go with whatever is installed by default than try to reinstall everything and fight a system that wasn't designed for it.
The laptop will take a few weeks to get here. So to prepare for when it lands on my porch, I decided to get into Sway on my current machine, to get used to it. I figured even if I don't like it, at least that way I'll be comfortable with it, and I'll know whether it's acceptable as it is or whether I should spend the time installing something more Win95-like.
But my current machine doesn't run Wayland, just plain Xorg. 2 minutes of searching revealed that Sway is in fact i3wm for Wayland.
Great! I promptly installed i3 on my Linux Mint box, switch to it, fucked around with the config file for a few hours and... I love it! That's pretty much exactly what I do with Cinnamon anyway but quicker!
And just like that, I switch to i3. I felt right at home with it from the get-go. The whole Win95-like UI was just a familiarity: in fact, what I've always wanted was a tiling window manager.
And yes, I did spend a few hours - almost half a day really - configuring the thing exactly how I like. But if I'm honest, I probably spent just as much time with Cinnamon way back when I switched to that too. So it's no different really.
So the takeaway here is: even if you have decades-old die-hard habits and you don't want to change, you should expose yourself to change every once in a while: you might just get surprised 🙂
I wished tiling windows would work like snapping of floating windows, but more powerful. For example instead of snapping only to the edge of the screen, I would for example hold alt while dragging a window and would get a preview of where the window would snap to depending on where I'm hovering. And that it would resize the other windows accordingly.
Having to remember or customize a billion keyboard shortcuts for switching between windows and rearranging the grid, makes tiling window managers DOA for me. I don't have the time/energy to set it up or practice the shortcuts.
You know, I used to think like that when I first learned Unix shell commands and vi. I shlepped through the learning process because I had to when I was a student. Then after graduation, I joined a Unix company so I was dragged deeper into it screaming and kicking, and I kept picking up more and more commands and shortcuts until they etched themselves deep into my muscle memory. At some point, it all stopped being a chore and it became second nature.
And it went like that for many other software I've used. Decades later, I get the payoff: I'm a fast engineer and the friction between what I want to do and the final result is very low despite working 90% of the time with the keyboard.
It was a pain to get there and it took a mighty long time, I'll be honest. but I reap the benefits now.
If I were you, I'd make the effort for that sort of thing. A couple of months tops: if you don't like it, you'll have wasted 2 months of your life. If you do, you'll have gained skills that will pay for your efforts for the rest of your life many times over.
Sway sort of does that. It does not resize live, but uses a transparent overlay to show where the window will be. You can do all of the moving and resizing with the mouse this way.