GNOME3
Is my personal favorite. I’ve used Unity Gnome2, XFCE, LXDE, and KDE; in addition to Winderz 7,8,10 and MacOSX.
GNOME3 is my favorite.
If you’re just polling - I’ll leave it at that. If you’d like me to elaborate on why, compares to the other DE’s, GNOME3 is my favorite, I’d be happy to do a deeper dive.
First, you won’t find parity between windows and Linux. Windows has a very good GUI that basically eliminates the need for shell commands.
Now that’s not to say Linux Desktops are not good. But vastly different.
Linux requires retraining your workflow, utilizing keyboard shortcuts and not expecting a windows design. And as much as I hate to say it, some things are done best in terminal.
I spent time in vein looking for programs that emulated the windows environment. I chose gnome which doesn’t typically have desktop icons. Learn that filesystems and drives are separate. And getting used to symlinks over shortcuts takes a minute.
I recommend you try to use the desktop as it was designed. After learning the features amd workflow I found I can navigate the system much faster, and now wish I could put gnome on top of windows.
Also If you want a specific feature there’s almost always an extension available.
I’ve used windows for over 20 years and Linux for 4. I choose Linux any day all day.
I have been through them all over the years and when I found i3 I fell in love instantly. I have it on every machine I use now, once you get used to how it works you never want for the archaic “windows experience” or clones of.
But… this is what suits me, day to day I spend 99% of the time on the keyboard, the mouse is rarely touched. The tiling manner suits a ton of terminals without wasting space. Most applications work well with it, but some just were not designed to have their windows scaled and look/behave terrible.
In short, this is what you get with Linux, play with each, evaluate them over a period and choose what suits your workflow best.
This is where windows sucks… you use it how Microsoft decide you should use it… if you don’t like it, then too bad. You have things like shell replacements, but they are never reliable nor do they integrate or perform well.
IMHO for someone that practically lives in terminals or text based editors i3 is incredible, espesially for mutliple monitor setups. Also i3 is just a window manager with a few very simple features, what you customize it with is entirely up to you. Mine is setup with all sorts of custom bindings and some apps I prefer to use over whatever gnome/mate/unity/kde want to push on you.
Not suggesting an agenda really, more that its easy to jump to an answer when the question isn’t always immediately clear, i notice it happens frequently, i’m prone to it as well.
10-4, no worries. Damn internet brains 
Wise man once said, To speak wisely, one must listen humbly .
Funny thing the default in OpenSUSE KDE is actually what you describe. After some testing it seems like your options may be different than default.
On Desktop right click with mouse > Configure Desktop > a window should appear, on the right there is a title “wallpaper” under it on Layout you probably have Desktop Containment switch it to Folder View
Once changed click apply and open the same path as above ^
now on the left there are a few more options.
On Location you can change the default folder of the desktop ( default is desktop folder but you can make it anything ).
this should have you fixed with that one.
( to arrange icons now just right click and there is arrange option just like in windows )
Well KDE is not a Windows clone or replacement so an accurate replacement menu is possible but should be custom. There may be a custom one on the net but I don’t feel like looking so I will sum it up how you can use the ones that are available.
On the “start menu” which is called application menu in KDE you can right click and then click on anternatives. then a new menu will occur with 2 more alternatives -
Application menu - default - the closest to a windows start menu
Application dashboard - closest to GNOME dashboard
Application Launcher - Mix betweeen the 2 and somewhat more noob friendly application menu ( bigger icons and multiple categorized sub menus )
Application menu has those points of your requirement -
A few pinned most important programs of my choice
on the left where mozilla firefox is you can drag and drop any program in this place
A search bar at the bottom that searches for installed programs
as you can see is also available and also searches through documents
when you start searching 2 new subcategories of the menu appear one is Applications which contains the applications that match your search and the other is Desktop which contains a search in documents/media/etc.
An “All Programs” like menu with all the installed programs
All the programs are in categories on the right however you can make it a single category that contains all applications if you want this is done by right clicking on anywhere in the menu and choosing Edit Applications option feeling lazy to describe the whole process but you can google search instructions.
A few of the most important folders of my choice
you can add shortcuts/folders/files/etc. from the Edit Applications option
A power related actions button
the power related buttons are those at the bottom left
from top to down
1st - log out
2nd - restart
3rd - shut down
those all prompt to a new screen that has all of them so its not bad if you missclick. on this screen you have 30 seconds to choose a new option or if left unchosen it will go with the default. If you press the default again before the timer expires it will do the action right now.
those are direct links that you can change by your liking
in the lowest menu on right which is named Power / Sessions are contained all of the default possible options which include -
Lock
Logout
Switch User
Suspend
Hibernate
Reboot
Shut Down
Well you kinda cant however Dolphin is close to windows explorer just really different 
Q: When I open up “My Computer”-like icon I get a window listing all of the available drives sorted by category (HDDs, CD/DVD ROMs, FDDs … etc.)
A: Well you don’t have My computer icon in linux but the closest to it is a Home folder on your desktop which will look like this when opened.
As you can see there are devices on the left however they are sorted by type and then name. It does not look like the default Windows sorting with local disk and etc.
Q:When I open up a folder it has a nice file sorting system top to bottom first criteria being the type (folder or a file) and the second criteria being the alphabetical sorting by file/folder name
A: All folders by default are sorted - by type - by name. So its always folders first then documents.
Q: The window always has a “basic navigation” bar on the left
A: This is always persistent in Dolphin
Q:The window always has an address bar on top
A: you can see it here where it says >Home for aesthetic reasons it doesnt look like a bar however it is. You can click on it to change it also if you click on control and then Configure dolphin - on Startup menu ( on the left ) you can find the options " Editable location bar " and also " Show full path inside location bar ". In the same window on General you can find the sorting mode and set a different one, you can set custom to which type of file to show preview or not , and other things.
There is one more thing with dolphin and KDE in general that is different than windows and that is it uses One click of the mouse to open files/programs to set it to double click open start menu, write mouse, press enter , choose - Double-Click to open files and folders.
Welcome to Level1techs forums where everyone is giving long ass list and posts
Thank you for your long ass answer, I love it. 
Had some free time so I also checked if there are custom menus that look like Windows start menu -
Windows 7 lookalike -
I must say both of them look kinda good to me so someday I may try them out.
Nice, thanks!
Yep running on KDE Plasma. OpenSuse.
In KDE you can just right click the element you want to change and there’s an alternative option which should show all the different plasma plugins for that type (e.g. menus for the default menu)
If you’re running opensuse you shouldn’t be getting the behaviour you described unless you happened to change something. Looks like @anon5644329’s post might describe how to fix it.
Idk why it wasn’t working like that before. Will check it out when I get back to my Linux system.
Personally, I use i3 on all laptops, and xfce4 with all the i3 shortcuts added on desktop. But then again, that requires some customization, and I’m not sure that’s what OP’s looking for.
If he wants a Windows-like start menu, wouldn’t Cinnamon with mostly GNOME apps (like Nautilus) make a good DE?
Some people suggested KDE, and good for them if they have a bug-free experience with it, but for me it has just never been as good an experience as xfce4 or even gnome.
Do you want a Linux distro where the slashes are the same way as windows, too?
I’m busting your chops on that; but, you gotta understand that Linux distros and unix are built differently than Windows. Like someone said its important to recognize the difference between drives and filesystems.
To your original post - what’s a UI that’s not disorganized - GNOME3. It’s incredibly organized; keep in mind depending on what distribution (Fedora vs Ubuntu, etc) or operating system it’s running on (“Linux” vs FreeBSD) what apps you get or where things are may be different. But, if you understand whatever you’re running - GNOME3 is a really solid interface into your operating system.
Here’s the most important part of this my whole post and I whole heartily am interested in helping you out:
As to your clarified post. I’m curious, if the Windows experience is important - what’s driving you to Linux?
For the most gentle learning curve coming from Windows:
Cinnamon. Hands down Cinnamon wins UX wise for now.
For the most tweakability, with onscreen gadgets and etc, most definitely KDE.
For Future proofing: KDE again. Cause Cinnamon is stuck on Xserver and will be for quite some time. Cinnamon has no plans of supporting Wayland.
For Linux Mint: Cinnamon is pretty much the only way forward. The UX is very user friendly, but they decided to EOL Linux Mint with KDE.
Doesn’t matter to me.
I know the difference…
I’ll check out the gnome3, but switching the whole DE with a WM seems like an awesome idea for me for at the moment. Don’t get me wrong I love a good DE, however I think that when I switch completely to a i3wm my productivity will be much better. (The reason being I’m a web dev)
As far as the reason why I love the Windows experience is… well… my ocd appreciates the cleanness and the effectiveness of that UI. What is driving me to Linux? An open source platform, the DIY nature and the minimized telemetry.
KDE plasma on OpenSuse is my current DE, and I like it, but it has a few of it’s issues. Scaling is all over the place and there are some minor bugs here and there…
Did you allready try the Cinnamon desktop?
If i’m correct Cinnamon made some improvements on desktop icon placings.
Cinnamon is as close to a Windows experiance as it gets pretty much.
KDE is an awesome DE, and is very customizable.
But it might need some time to figure out all the settings and options it has.
KDE is really overwhelming wenn it comes it its customization options and settings.
But once you figured it all out, its probablly one of the best DE’s arround.
Okay expand on that. I might have a solution for this too
Check it out when you have free time I suggest the OpenSUSE integration. KDE started using OpenQA which is OpenSUSE made open source software for automatic testing. Now their releases have gone through the roof in stability. There are still bugs sometimes if you are rolling however I have yet to experience a problem with stable.
