Add to this tons of translations to different languages, not to mention different versions of the book in the same language. So it’s a massive buffet where anybody can pick whatever suits their taste.

Hail seitan!

There’s also Xfce4, MATE, Cinnamon which come ith man, OS installers as an option. Not to mention various smaller projects (e.g. LXDE or whatever the cool kids use nowadays). Personally I’ve been spoilt by Awesome WM since 2008 and can’t live without terminal/shell.

Needing to use command line for some things that should be a right click

Right click where? All major DE’s/WM’s implement stuff in their own way. The problem here is we don’t (and won’t) have a unified GUI that everyone uses, unlike the other two main OS’s. (Note: I don’t see this as a problem, more as a result of the FLOSS ecosystem being such a rich soil to build stuff on.)

I think Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning was the Command Line has some valid points even today.