“rough start” is putting it mildly. 🤭

KDE.

My advice: try them all, then decide. They are all free. Most offer live systems. It will only cost you time, which will be well spent learning.

tl;dr: Break things and have fun.

Lightweight? I guess things have changed in the last 15+ years… I personally settled on Sayonara. Then I discovered Nuclear. Still undecided.

KDE has given me the desktop I need for the past few years. Hyprland isn’t a desktop environment, as far as I know.

Before KDE I used Cinnamon on Linux Mint. It was functional, but after many years I wanted a change.

Use whatever suits your needs. In my experience, KDE and Cinnamon are the most complete desktop environments without having to install extensions or extra software. Both are mature, have large communities behind them, and release incremental updates frequently. Those are my criteria for a good desktop environment.

And that’s why I don’t use flatpaks. Nothing like that has ever happened to me.

As other have said, a combination of Firefox PDF tool, PDF Arranger and Xournal++ is all I’ve ever needed. And Okular is nowadays my viewer of choice, which does a lot on its own, too.

Quake 2 would be nice, since I already got Quake 1 on GOG. 🙋‍♂️

My plan for the holidays is finally completing Doom, Doom 2, Quake, and all the boomer shooters I have.

Half supervillain is American enough.

KDE.

BioShock.

It would be easier to just try the live systems (booting from USB).

Changed to Cinnamon (Linux Mint) after GNOME 3 and Ubuntu’s Unity went bonkers, then changed to KDE Plasma some years ago.

I think KDE is constantly working to improve the desktop paradigm. GNOME tried to change the paradigm… I didn’t like what I saw. I’m too old to learn new tricks.

Can confirm. The UI alone is atrocious.

When they’re ready.

How is this newsworthy… smh

It rhymes. In a bad way.

KDE. Because of its simplicity. Unsarcastically.

The 2020s are not over. Not even half ways.

Short answer: yes, and that’s a good thing.

Slightly longer answer: it’s a sign of maturity for the most popular distributions and of the platforms at large. Innovation tends to happen in the fringes. Being it free software, someone can always fork the software and add their new ideas to the mix.