Linux: Well asking that question is impossible to answer. Depends on the desktop environment. BUT by default No But if you put in the time to set things up most of the time yes.
KDE4 - Yes, but might have to fiddle a bit. Do able.
Gnome 3 - Not really
LXQT - Yes
i3 (Tiled Window Manager) - Yes perfectly BUT I had to set everything up by hand. I love i3!
KDE has always supported as many task bars as you want, Windows you limited to 1 task bar or 1 task bar per monitor in win8, and it is very limited, KDE you can have 2,3,4 or more taskbars on every monitor and can put anything you want in them
Gnome2 was similar.
Gnome3 does not have a taskbar at all, there is a extension that kinda creates it but the work flow for Gnome3 is taskbar-less, but the biggest problem with Gnome3 is there is a bug that has been there for a LONG time when you have stacked monitors the window manger gets all screwed up, so you can only have monitors configured in a strait horizontal configuration.
Cinnamon only supports a single taskbar which is one of my biggest complaints with cinnamon
Unity I believe is single only as well, but I have very limited exposure to ubuntu desktop
i3 is indeed the best of the bunch as far as tiling WMs go on Linux (IMO of course, some prefer Awesome, X Monad, etc.).
As far as setup goes i3 is an absolute cake walk (relative to Awesome et al where you have to script your way to Nirvana), just edit provided config to your liking (yes, if you want conky piped into i3 status bar you have to do a little homework, but otherwise ridiculously straight forward).
If you prefer a full blown DE you can actually wrap a tiling WM over the DE (i.e. they can work together) so the answer to the OP is an emphatic yes, any Linux can do the trick.
Does i3 support each monitor showing an independent workspace like XMonad does? I can't say I'm the world's biggest fan of XMonad, which tends to be a pain to configure, but I just can't live without being able to have each monitor acting as independent entity any more!
> Does i3 support each monitor showing an independent workspace like XMonad does?
How do you mean? That sounds like basic TWM functionality. I know with something like Compiz when you switch to a workspace all of your monitors switch at the same time, which is kind of pointless.
i3 gives you 95% of what you could do yourself with Awesome, Xmonad et al, just without having to do much of anything beyond edit a config and choose which apps you'd like bound to which workspaces, which ones should go to the scratchpad (e.g. Skype, VLC, etc.), which ones should be floatable and so on.
The ability to tab tiles is probably the killer feature of i3, if you do sysadmin work being able to break a set of 20 terminals into a quadrant of 5 tabbed terminals each all on a single screen is pretty much a dream ;-) Furthermore you can tile vertically and horizontally within any given region, it's turtles all the way down...
I love OSX, but the jumping is a very new behavior and the application specific parts of the menu bar aren't even a good idea for large monitors (let alone multiple monitors).
