Spot on re : tooling -- likewise, I too gave up on Gnome early on, and also dislike KDE [too heavy] -- a friend turned me on to LXDE and it's been smooth sailing since
If you haven't tried KDE Plasma in the last year or two, it's worth revisiting. I tentatively tried KDE 4.x back when it was the hot thing, and was disgusted by how it seemed to bring even a top-spec gaming desktop to its knees. Now I run Plasma 5 on my laptop (on Void Linux - I feel that package maintainers make a big difference here), and it's far and away the best desktop experience I've ever had.
I've finally recovered that sense I always got from the Windows 95 shell, that's been missing in every desktop environment until now - that sense of "wow, they've really thought this through".
Agreed. I have always chased my tail when it comes to distros, and when it finally came around to checking out kde (¡again) the plasma version was really an awesome surprise. It still has a few warts, but it's the prettiest/cohesive of them all.
