IMO your post should be parsed and formatted in a way to become a post in a “new to linux” pinned thread. Very helpful.
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Got quite a lot of replies. Personally, I don’t care what other people use, I agree with the tool for the job. But I’m here to reply that choice is what makes Linux great. Just FYI, I’m using Windows 10 on my gaming PC. On my work laptop I’m using Ubuntu with a tweaked KDE (made it look and feel like Unity, minus a few things that I couldn’t emulate), on my home small server I’m using default Ubuntu (GNOME Shell) and most of the time just remoting via SSH, I used Arch Linux in the past (I kinda want to go back to it, as I hate not having the latest features, especially on KDE), I administer CentOS VMs (of course w/o GUI), I’ve got a pfSense firewall and OpenVPN for my home network and I could go on about the OS and platform I interact with on a daily basis.
On all the Linux boxes (and even in Windows pcs) I have, I don’t find a need to replace the apps I’m using, I’m mostly using default ones. I don’t have music on my PC, I just go on YT for that. I’m only using Firefox, Falkon and sometimes Brave (for things that I don’t trust on my main browser), VLC on everything, usually default Terminals (GNOME Terminal / Konsole), Kate / Gedit, nano / Vim, Remmina for RDC and VNC, Libre Office on everything, Thunderbird on everything, Kodi (for YT if I don’t enable JS, like on my work PC), KeePassXC, GNOME Software / KDE Discover and the list goes on.
I never needed to look for other software and test “what’s best”, I use what’s available. I did try to look once for non-GTK and non-KDE Qt apps that don’t use lots of resources, for a very low-end PC (we’re talking Intel Atom D and nVidia Ion level here) to use under JWM and found a few on Gentoo’s wiki. But other than a very few specific cases, or when you truly need to look for a better tool for the job, then you don’t have to change the defaults or your preferences. I never understood people who came to Linux only to fill their time with changing everything once every 2 days and distro-hopping every 2 weeks (for a short period when you first begin your Linux journey, that’s fine, but after a year of getting used to it, then what’s the point, I can’t get that).
I’m not bashing you, I’m genuinely curious as to why are you looking to change your text editor, your terminal, your DE and whatever-else very often. On Windows you probably use Notepad / Notepad++, 1 or 2 browsers, Windows Explorer for files, either the UWP app for music or the old Windows Media Player 12, the UWP Photos or Windows Photo Viewer and so on. In Windows you probably aren’t looking to change Explorer with Saladin or Total Commander, Photos with whatever else and so on. Why are you looking to change them in Linux and not use what you got by default or what your preferred software is?
I agree with everything, except the KDE part. I am biased for KDE, I acknowledge that, but the performance and stability for me is way better than GNOME Shell or Unity (and I’m a Unity fanboy, it was hard decision for me to abandon it after the support ended and I’ve even been part of the community testing on 17.10 daily build and of 18.04 daily build for around 1 month). Of course, YMMV and of course again, as you mentioned, KDE is not on the performance and stability level of XFCE, but KDE is in very active feature development (especially on the Wayland side with KWin) and always gets new tools (like how they made KDEConnect a few years ago). If you want new features and pretty good performance and stability, KDE is great. If you want rock-solid stability, I agree that XFCE is the home of stability.
KDE requires a few tweaks for me to get it running, but after I’ve configured it, I don’t need to change it for a long time and it just works.
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Forgot to mention something, coming back to the OP, what I hate about my budget gaming PC (running W10) is the unexpected restarts that sometime happen when I sleep. I hate finding my PC locked. I never pressed the “Check for updates” button and managed to get a bug and Windows couldn’t update itself anymore and managed to get an uptime of 1 month (I think it was around July / August last year), but I had my noVideo GPU driver crash and had to restart and since then, it started checking for updates again. Now I can’t get 5 days without my GPU driver crashing (it works for a while, around 3-4 days uptime and after that, boom, 640x400 resolution - yes, I purged the old driver, cleaned installed the new one and still got issues; no, I did not try to revert to the old driver, I don’t want to go back in time). I will always hate Windows with a passion, but it has pretty good performance on my budget SSD (stability and control of the OS is the problem). I want to buy an M.2 SSD and install Arch on it and do the KVM GPU passthrough, but since I never did that before, I’m too lazy to look what IOMMU groups my MSI B250M PRO-VH has or even if it has IOMMU at all, not to mention that I doubt my Pentium G4560 and 8 GB of RAM would be enough to satisfy Windows 10 as a guest OS (if you wonder what I’m gaming on it, I’m only into ultra-casual, low-resource MMORPGs - Tree of Savior - and into DOOM mods, nothing else - no, I don’t “need” a performance PC and I’m a low-power consumption, USFF PCs fan - in the future I might get a quad-core with SMT Ryzen 3 or 4 APU when DDR5 will be fast enough to satisfy the iGPU and AMD makes something equivalent to a 1050Ti or 1060; and I know they can, they did it on Intel’s Hades Canyon NUC using HBM).
This comment is longer than I expected, I’ll stop here.
I understand. Im kind of adicted to a linux work flow now and when using windows get frustrated.
Still Civ Vi on Fedora 29 just stopped working. I used support and a month and a half later I have the DLC Gathering storms for free but the game still does not work.
I stuck in an SSD and it works on Ubuntu 18.10…But yer. Im over distro hopping and customizing every container and flatpak.
Shit should just work I get that.