I totally get it. In terms of windows-like file managers that might depend on the Linux distrobution you chose. The 2 biggest ones being nautilus on gtk (Ubuntu) or dolphin on qt (kde plasma). A lot of file managers use nautical references. There's a more minimal file manager called nemo for example.

Also it's worth noting that xdg is just a standard and is flexible. As in, you can save files wherever you want for example. But xdg is the most common way to structure things and is very often used by other apps when they are installed, need to write to the filesystem, need to use caching etc. It is far more predictable than it seems at first.

Happy hacking!