I’ve dabbled with Linux over the years, first with Ubuntu in the early 2010s, then Elementary OS when that dropped, and a few years ago I really enjoyed how customizable the gui was with Xubuntu. I was able to make it look just like WIndows 2000 which was really cool.
Which current distro has the best GUI, in your opinion? I find modern Ubuntu to feel a little basic and cheap. I guess I don’t really like modern Gnome. I’m currently using Windows 10 LTSC which is probably the best possible version of Windows, but I’d jump to linux if I could find a distro with a gui that feels at least as polished and feature rich as Windows 10 LTSC.
I couldn’t agree more. I think that tying yourself to a specific distribution is a good way to keep yourself in a box. I think the better question here is “What DE do you prefer?” and then choose your distro based on your preferences for desktop environments while keeping other things in mind (i.e. frozen packages or rolling base).
I, like yourself, pretty much require KDE to be functional on my desktop. A great distro for me is one that ships new KDE releases without much delay (or at least, one that’s not completely unreasonable) without having to wait for the next LTS release to get all the goodies. This narrows down the choices pretty substantially as there aren’t a lot of distros that meet this spec:
I prefer to have a rolling (or close to rolling base) so that really only leaves me with the top 3 options.
I’m not really here to shill for KDE, but just encourage folks to find the DE that feels most comfortable to them and then work on your requirements from there.