Anyone who does this should be blacklisted entirely

I’ve picked xfce on basically every distro I’ve used and I’ve hopped through like 30 distro’s.

takes lace gloves off

I feel extremely called out right now.

puts lace gloves back on

I very much understand your pain, my drive died mid-year while I was at university, I just cleaned it up and added it to a virtual machine with win10 to finish projects with the windows based programs.

Worked surprisingly well. I used virtual machine manager on arch (and now endeavour, I can’t stop distro hopping but I’ve stayed on endeavour the longest)

I’ve had great results with EndeavourOS

When the windows update bricked my OS I sighed in pure relief as I could finally stop using windows forever. As an added bonus I didn’t lose any work because the drive was fully accessible to arch… after windows said it had encrypted the drive.

Absolute trash operating system and I have zero regrets leaving.

I stopped using paper and suddenly my printer problems went away

I would personally recommend EndeavourOS or PopOS.

https://endeavouros.com/

https://pop.system76.com/

I recommend EndeavourOS primarily because of it’s ease of use and rolling distro means you’ll have access to the latest bug fixes and patches (and a very active and supportive community), whereas it does come with the drawback of requiring to fix things every now and then if you’ve installed packages from places other than endeavour/Aur or require packages/apps that are older.

Yay (package manager) is very easy to get using as a beginner, however, if you don’t want rolling updates and just large update packages similar in scope to windows service pack updates I’d recommend popos or the sister/base os ubuntu. (fedora apparently may be good in this instance as well but I’ve very little contact with the OS and have been avoiding RHEL-related products recently because of their anti-consumer and anti-open source actions recently).

Ultimately it’s definitely recommended that you try a few distro’s to get a feel for what you like and then customize to your hearts content.

https://distrowatch.com/ if you’d like a more in depth review of various distros and what their performance bonuses or problems are.

EndeavourOS with xfce4 is very clean and quick to pick up with their little introductory/learning module that they include (once installed or on live, it will provide a popup that includes the following):