Once Windows got rid of the gorgeous Aero theme starting in Windows 8, plus the shitty UI/UX that Windows got again starting in Windows 8, pushed me to Linux.

Honestly because it’s quite customizable, that’s about it. Being able to customize my software to look and work the way I want them to is a big reason why I use certain programs over others.

EndeavourOS as the distro of choice for easy installation and AUR access.

Depending on the DE, if it’s not MATE, I almost always install Caja, Engrampa, and MATE Calculator since they just have the most sane look and UX to them for my use cases.

• Waterfox as my browser of choice (reason over Firefox is that it offers tabs below address bar as an option in Preferences rather than mucking about in userChrome.css files that often break on updates)
• Vivaldi as a secondary browser for websites that only render right in Chromium
• Kitty as my terminal of choice.
• Clementine as my music player of choice
• yt-dlp for downloading Youtube videos as mp3s
• htop over top, also have gotop for a more graphical look
• exa over ls

MATE as is or Xfce with some MATE software (swapping Thunar for Caja, swapping the XFCE calculator program for MATE’s calculator, using Engrampa instead of whatever Xfce uses for a file archive manager, etc.). I like things simple and following roughly the same paradigm that I’ve used for years.

And for the love of god, PLEASE KEEP MENU BARS AS THEY WERE IN THE PAST! Stop removing menu bars from programs in favor of “hamburger buttons” or whatever nonsense modern programs like to use! That’s honestly one of my biggest gripes with “modern” software, they keep changing the paradigm to something that I haven’t used and I can’t be bothered to relearn everything.

I disagree. I actually like the LibreOffice, non-tabbed, UI. It’s a UI/UX that I’m used to from Office 2003 and honestly prefer. The 2007+ ribbon interface makes things harder for me to find.

Anything after 7 is bad in my eyes. I HATE the direction Windows went with the UI style, doing away with the Vista and 7 Aero look. Plus Windows 10 drives me up the wall trying to find the proper settings (is it Settings or Control Panel? Why do we have both?!).

The Caja file manager. Hell the MATE desktop environment in general is just perfect for me. Xfce is acceptable too, though the inclusion of CSD in recent Xfce releases has made me a bit more wary of it when it comes to theming.

I also use Waterfox as my browser. A Firefox fork that has the option to put tabs below address bar (where they belong imo) out of the box without needing to muck around with the userChrome.css file.

This exists, but it has the downside of being a web app rather than a native application. Can’t use it offline for instance.

Xfce overall, but I like MATE a lot as well. Just give me a traditional desktop experience, I don’t need mobile-like options on a desktop.

I actually switched to MATE primarily because I like its suite of software a bit more (calculator, file manager, file archiver) than Xfce’s, though I use some of MATE’s stuff (Caja mainly) on Xfce on my laptop.