Never said that it can’t be customised.

From my experience it is just not build in by default and not quite as easy.

But that was also years ago, so I am by no means a good source here.

The way I always heard it described (with the default setup) for the most popular DE’s:

• KDE Plasma is the most “windows like” DE by default. Layout and most common behaviour will be very similar
• GNOME is more oriented towards a macOS like style. It doesn’t allow as much customisation out of the box as others.
• XFCE is also a solid choice, not many integrated applications (KDE have their own version for many things like file explorer or search)

There a lot of others like LXQT, options that are not the “usual” Desktop Environment e.g. tiling window managers like Hyprland.

A lot of these can be installed in parallel and you can then choose which to start on the login manager, if you want to experiment which you like more.

There is also the choice of display protocol (X11 or Wayland), with X11 being the older more widely supported option. Not all DE’s will work on Wayland.