Well it has been my "daily driver" for a week now. Here are my thoughts.

Linux has come a long, long way,, it does most of what I want it to do, but not a complete replacement for window$
The software installer worked for some things but not others (I KNEW it wouldn't be that easy!)
Kept having a problem with the screen going black for one second - might be fixed now, not sure
The zip utility kept crashing
Now I know that XFCE is supposed to be lightweight, but I am amazed by how little disk accessing there is. Window$ 10 is constantly asking the disk!

Overall grade - B+

This may get me to stop using Win7 semi-permanently

System = Optiplex 5070 SFF with 8 GB of RAM, drive = Samsung EVO 870 500 GB. Is this a high-spec system?

ncmark wrote on Today, 00:10:

System = Optiplex 5070 SFF with 8 GB of RAM, drive = Samsung EVO 870 500 GB. Is this a high-spec system?

I run MATE (on Debian) on systems a few years older than that. The 8GB RAM is still pretty roomy with XFCE or MATE, and if you aren't running any virtual machines (which is where 8GB starts to bind really)

Like you, I find the boot process is a grind (literally if you're still using an HDD) but once it's up and running and your browser has been open at least once, it runs mostly from RAM

The issues you have might be XFCE-specific, not sure

After watching art creations like this:

I have some very good advice for you: Do NOT attempt to switch! That's just the best way to fail. Make the transition smooth as possible. There is nothing bad on Multi-booting.

An advice from someone who started with FC3 and will probably format their partition with Windows. After 20 years or something.