You just said it yourself. I do like to tinker. I can install a distro in 15 minutes. I can fix my system. I do make backups. Why would I need or want an atomic distro again?

“rough start” is putting it mildly. 🤭

KDE.

My advice: try them all, then decide. They are all free. Most offer live systems. It will only cost you time, which will be well spent learning.

tl;dr: Break things and have fun.

Never.

Lightweight? I guess things have changed in the last 15+ years… I personally settled on Sayonara. Then I discovered Nuclear. Still undecided.

As other have said, a combination of Firefox PDF tool, PDF Arranger and Xournal++ is all I’ve ever needed. And Okular is nowadays my viewer of choice, which does a lot on its own, too.

BioShock.

Changed to Cinnamon (Linux Mint) after GNOME 3 and Ubuntu’s Unity went bonkers, then changed to KDE Plasma some years ago.

I think KDE is constantly working to improve the desktop paradigm. GNOME tried to change the paradigm… I didn’t like what I saw. I’m too old to learn new tricks.

Nowadays I’m trying omnivore.app, also Feeder on Android and Pocket for good measure.

Manjaro/KDE/Plasma

I don’t use Wayland. I can. I’ve tried, but I went back to X. On Wayland, when I take a Firefox tab out of a window to make it it’s own window, there’s a pause of over a second until the new window appears. It drives me crazy every time. On X it’s instantaneous.

I don’t use two monitors, I don’t use Nvidia. For everything else I use my computer for, I haven’t found an advantage of using Wayland over X. So, I’ll stay on X until I’m forced to change, I guess.