I lost my home to an accident. An rm -rf accident... :(

I've used Linux since the mid 00's and, well, I've seen some shit. But nowadays? It's the best desktop OS I've used. I recently had to start using a Mac for work and realized just how far DE's like Gnome and KDE have gotten. It feels like I have to fight MacOS every single day to get it to do the absolute basics, the things that Gnome and KDE does out of the box. And the most ridiculous thing is that the app ecosystem for MacOS is so heavily focused on monetization that if you purchase enough apps to customize the MacOS DE to an acceptable level, you'd likely have spent enough money to buy another laptop. Madness.

TL;DR: Turns out that this year is actually the year of Linux on the desktop!

Back in the early days of Ubuntu, I was blown away by the amount of interesting free stuff on Synaptic, so I started installing everything that caught my eye. A few hours later and my Ubuntu install was completely borked. I think the install scripts back then we're pretty unregulated, so there was probably a ton of conflicting dependencies causing trouble.

I eventually reinstalled the os. Then I did the same thing again. Twice. Then I learned.

KDE is the answer to all of OPs problems.

The uutils project is aiming for full compatibility though, so eventually you will be able to just swap them out.

Aside from performance, I also noticed that older PC games work better on Linux than Windows nowadays. I really enjoy playing games from the late 90's to early 2000's, and they tend to run great on Linux with proton. Just the last year I've played all of Baldurs Gate 1, Icewind Dale 1 and Icewind Dale 2 on my scrappy Lenovo laptop and it's been great.

Are... are we the ~~baddies~~ one percent?

Your setup is close to my 2015 very-much-non-gaming laptop, so... I'd recommend retro gaming and/or modern 2D games. A few suggestions would be: Baldur's Gate 1-2, Icewind Dale 1, Xenonauts, Battle Brothers, Wildermyth, Shadowrun Returns (and sequels), Into the Breach, Fallout 1-2. If you're into programming games, that hardware should run everything by Zachtronics as well as Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans.

I don't use Endeavor or Arch (btw), but KDE Plasma is amazing. I'd probably be happy with any distro as long as it supported plasma.

Kate, Terminator, k4dirstat and the amazing clipboard history app in KDE.

Just to clarify a few points in #1: CISC has gone largely (entirely?) extinct, so it doesn't play into this. Arm processors are more efficient than x86, but Risc-v is even more efficient than Arm, giving them an edge in cheap, low power computing. However, some companies have started experimenting with Risc-v for HPC applications, so it's turning out more versatile than expected. Just this week there was also news of a bunch of companies banding together to develop Risc-v chips for automobile and Telecom, so don't be surprised if we get Risc-v smartphones and tablets in the near future.

I had a colleague who ran NixOS on his work laptop and loved it. He even held a presentation to the rest of the engineering dept about it. Then IT contacted him and said company policy only allowed running Ubuntu and he had to reinstall.

He resigned shortly after.