This article is a translation I made from my French Article, I'm not a native English speaker, this article ought have a lot of language mistake, I "translated" my article 'cause I wanted it to be accesible to the english community. If you don't want to read a "translated" article with surely a bad english you can leave this page by clicking here.
Haaa, terminals... Don't you think it sounds savage ? Did you know that every program use a terminal ? You may have understand what I want to talk about in this article... About Mc Donalds right ! (Just kidding). This article is about Desktop environment (or GUI - Graphical User Interface).
Let's start by talking about Windows !
Windows
Haaa... Windows... This mythic OS used on over 90% on the computer in the world.Everyone know about Windows. For EVERYONE (except Linux and Mac OSX lovers) Windows is THE OS REFERENCE. It's one of the first which used a GUI. Maybe since Windows Millenium.
Since this version of Windows, Microsoft always tried to provide an OS usable for everyone without using the tricky command line of the terminal. However, on each version of Windows, the OS always had one and only one GUI, we can note Modern UI that EVERYONE love on Windows 8/8.1 (just kidding) or even Continuum on Windows 10.
Then cause of that, we can't clearly talk about GUI, we have to find something which could have several different GUI, that's why we'll talk of...
Linux
You had understood it, to talk about GUI, Linux is the perfect choice. Linux always has been at the fronter between terminals and GUI, and they've never said "We want to build a wall" cause they took the advantage of the both territories. Linux is Free, and open-sourced, that's the reason why there are so many distros... You can check a little list by clicking here. That's why Linux OS family is the biggest one.Well, you can say a Linux OS is a hard to use, but some of them are quite easy to use 'cause they designed a really soft and simple GUI.
As I said, Linux has a lot of distros, and that also means that it has a lot of different software and then GUI. We'll talk about some of them. (the most known):
Gnome & Unity and my favorite one: Cinnamon.
First image: Gnome, Second one: Unity. They are both famous GUI used on a lot of Linux OS (as Ubuntu). They have a kind of taskbar/dock at the bottom for Gnome and at the left for Unity. And a config bar at the top for Gnome & Unity. I think Gnome is pretty aweful, it has a old-looking design which didn't have been redesigned for years. By the way Gnome also have some varient as Mate or Gnome Shell which are pretty nice. About Unity, it has a good feeling when you're using it, the dock is pretty good and you easily know which app are launched or not... But I really don't like to have the title of the app i'm using and the command "close/minimize..." in the top bar cause the controls disapear when you're not focusing your mouse on it. And I think that's kind of annoying.
Let's now talk about Cinnamon:
Cinnamon, is a GUI that you can find on Linux Mint (the Linux OS I use). And... WAHHHHH ! It looks like Windows ! Just kidding, the the task bar and the config bar are only ONE BAR on this version. That's the main reason about why Cinnamon is the GUI I prefer. But I'm also a Windows users then that should be the second reason of why i'm using it.
To Conclude
GUI is a really important thing, not on Windows cause you can't modify it (except with some third softwares), cause it's the "place" that you'll always see when you're on your computer, then you should personalize it as you like to be sure it exactly represent who you are.Thanks to all the readers. You can tell me which OS you prefer or ask me question about things you didn't understand.
Sources: znet.com, ubuntu.com.