Arch + KDE: i like the aur and the easy building of packages in general KDE has a nice ootb expirience and i can work on it without much difference even on major changes. The desktop is easy to understand for people migrating and can be customized extensivly.

Arch + i3 is what I used until a couple years ago, then decided to move to Wayland, and Sway was buggy on my system so I went vanilla Gnome. It does all I need and also I get to have my settings in a simple script file which is just a bunch of gsettings calls.

I still think that the i3 way of managing windows is amazing, but I actually rarely needed lots of windows in the same workspace tiled.

I only have one extension installed from the package manager for the tray and that's it. Also on Fedora now only because of some proprietary software I need to run, but I also like the distro.

Bodhi + lxde

Xfce.

Understands Windows-style keyboard navigation and shortcuts, which is way faster than reaching for a mouse and trying to aim at anything on screen.

For speed, learn _all_ the keyboard shortcuts. I mostly use my mouse only in web browsers: everything else is keyboard-driven.

I also rate Ubuntu's Unity for this. Looks like macOS but understands all the Windows keystrokes, even quite obscure ones.

For example the QuickLaunch bar, added in Win98 and deprecated from Vista on.

https://www.ancsite.com/bringing-back-windows-xp-style

Windows + 1...9 opens the n th item in the QL toolbar. Win+1 opens the first pinned app, Win+2 the second, Win+3 the third, etc. This works in Unity.

From Ubuntu to ArchLinux or Rocky is a big change. But let's go!

Manjaro + XFCE4 or Plasma Why? Arch based and let's you get into the ArchLinux world of doing things. AUR is a huge plus.

RockyLinux + XFCE4 or Plasma A rock solid distro that put's you to learn the same commands for the Red Hat world. Since most software works on Fedora, it will work here.

So my desktop is ArchLinux + XFCE4 but my favorite is Plasma. All my other RHEL or Rocky have no desktop environment, only terminal.

I don't like Ubuntu for so many reasons but many people use it. Instead of Ubuntu, I would prefer Debian.

Stay away from? Fedora, CentOS, and all other, unless you want to test those, but you can do it on a VM.

For example, Alpine is great but for some specific scenarios.

Also choose a systemd distro. If you want to test a systemd-less distro, do it on a vm.

Fedora as easiest dev distro; all you gotta do is choose a spin, then you’re off. If you like customizing, you cannot go wrong with Arch. I currently use Arch with KDE.

Stay away from tiling WM: most people don’t ever really need them. KDE and XFCE offer full keyboard shortcut customisation out of the box.

On Linux, speed comes not from the OS or distro, but from DE/WM used and presence of hardware acceleration.

For me, choice of a distro boils down to picking a package manager, since everything else is basically the same.

I use Ubuntu for development. I tried not to get into customization and focus on my side projects, so I prefer something similar to the (pre-10) Windows experience.

I really like Gentoo. They now have binary packages, which is often convenient. An user patches are really a killer feature for me.

I use it with Sway.

Microsoft Windows 2000 server, with Microsoft Office 2000 Professional and Delphi represented the best UI and place to build programs, for me. If I could, I'd run that forever on my desktop PC.

Everything was in a logical place, it used existing hardware well, and you could do almost anything with it.

It didn't have that weird thing where it would "snap" to the corners, or have strange mouse effects to try to dock things all the time. Clippy wasn't trying to sell my data, and was easily disabled, permanently. Remote Desktop made it possible to work remotely, even over a slower connection. All awesome stuff.

Linux Mint Xfce. It's definitely not easy because I was so used to mouse and spacially oriented Mac OS X. It's fast enough because of fast hardware, and it doesn't get in the way, and I customize it. I remove unused parts. I have customized it to my own preferences. I put up with the rough edges. The only thing missing is the menu bar. Xfce is not my favourite but I can customize it which is reason enough.

Debian Trixie is snappy. Feels faster than Ubuntu and Fedora.

After a few weeks of learning curve, Arch and Hyprland.

To install Arch, just use archinstall.

To get a pretty decent Hyprland configuration going with excellent documentation, try Omarchy[1], but there are several other ready configurations. From there, the user experience is infinitely customizable.

Yes, I'm a "highly technical" user familiar with Linux.

No, I'm not a person who likes to fiddle. I just want to get work done efficiently. So, you might be surprised at my pick, but I'm not spending much time fiddling around.

1. https://manuals.omamix.org/2/the-omarchy-manual

I've dabbled in at least trying the absolute basics of the popular DEs. Cinnamon, KDE, Gnome, whatever Ubuntu's current thing is called, Pop's Gnome spinoff, XFCE. Think I tried Budgie for like a minute too.

The one I stuck with the longest was Gnome on Manjaro.

Otherwise, I kind of like them all in their own way. The only reason I left Cinnamon in the first place was ~4 years ago I had this bug where switching virtual desktops by the arrow shortcut would get progressively laggier.

I usually install XFCE and I3WM side by side.

XFCE is nice to use when you plug in your laptop into a monitor, so you can drag windows around. Its fast, configurable, and does everything I need.

I3WM is what I log into when using the laptop by itself.