I see – arch just seemed like a huge management pain to get all of my different software stacks working and playing nicely together when I last played with it. It’s also pretty easy to switch desktop environments regardless of your distro, but I don’t mind gnome (plus gnome-tweaks).
They want you to access everything through search and recently accessed because its so intuitive. It’s like they want computers to be as hard to use as possible for people who need to do actual work on many projects in any sort of organized way.
Also, now that IT has integrated everything with OneDrive, I routinely have to wait for my own files to be redownloaded before accessing them.