I used nano when I started but now I am using vim for one year already. I’d recommend taking a few days where you only use vim and I think you will see why people like it. With a few motions you can be much faster than you would be in Nano.
I recently started using the openbar extension which adds a lot of color to Gnome with just a few clicks.
I switched to Commit Mono for Terminal not too long ago but I really like it. Otherwise I use Cantarell but only because it is default and I never felt the need to change it.
I only have experience with Gnome out of the two but I haven’t had the urge to switch yet. I like the look of it (I like that it looks different to Windows), the simplicity and the customisation with extensions (only a few and small ones, I recently started using OpenBar for some customization but I could do without). I keep my system rather minimal and I am not looking to put a lot of time into theming or customization.
I also tried Cosmic and I like the tiling aspect of it, but I also don’t feel the need to switch. Maybe once it is released and I can figure out how to install it on Aeon.
If I remember correctly I got them from this collection on archive.org and honestly they are just really nice quality pictures. But probably also a bit of nostalgia. 😄
TIL there’s people thinking about stuff like this. Honestly a wallpaper is just some image that you chose to make your desktop nice to look at to me. I think I even used Windows XP wallpapers on Linux for some time.
Also only very little software comes preinstalled which does not apply to Silverblue for example if I remember correctly.
I guess if you want exciting new features you can just switch to a different distro nowadays or add them yourself. Why should distros add more stuff making them bloated or change stuff turning users away that like how things are currently? For general use you really don’t need a lot of fancy new stuff.
I’m using Aeon and I’m happy with it, especially the auto updates since i now never really have to actively think about updating (just reboot when you can to get the new stuff). It has a minimal immutable base system and the recommended way of installing apps is to use Flatpaks from Flathub for GUI and distrobox for terminal apps (GUI apps can also be exported from Distrobox to be launched like all the other flatpaks). Distrobox even allows you to install packages from different distros in separate containers so it doesn’t really matter that your base system is openSUSE.
It’s not made for tinkering but rather to have one very similar configuration on all Aeon installs to make troubleshooting easier. However it is still in release candidate stage so it might be required to reinstall once a new RC version comes out or once it is released.
It’s for people that don’t want a big bulky IDE and are willing to put a little work in to get used to it. I do all my coding in the terminal with vim and tmux and I like the simplicity and that with two dotfiles I can migrate my whole development environment to whatever PC, server or RaspberryPi that I need.