Gamey

htop, distrobox and in some cases Flatpak!

Edit: after reading the comments I want to add curl and git, seriously, why aren’t those a default?!

I don’t think it’s a SSD vs HDD situation (both should work perfectly fine with any DE) but rather a case of old and dieing HDD, that’s at least what caused my system to fuck up two years ago or somethimg like that. There are systems that work better on far slower than HDD (today only “achived” by dieing HDDs) speed tho so I could imagine that improving the situation, just don’t sotre important stuff on that till you got a new drive!

If you create multiple user accounts you can contain the user specific parts for those accounts if I am not wrong, certain thing will probably still be a little messy but I only tried it on the same account before and never did again, that could pribably help a little!

That’s because you are on XFCE and they haven’t adopted Wayland yet, NVidia drivers sadly really struggle with that but it’s slowly getting better!

Definitely AMD, they give people enough data to build open source drivers and you will simply have better support and integration with those. It’s not like Nvidia drivers are awful or anything but they just cause annoyances and especially with new technologies like Wayland (Display server protocol that most of Linux is about to adopt) they can be a pain. AMD GPUs work great on Linux, have far better pricing rn and they have no issues with Windows ether, even if you used Windows more I would recommend AMD rn for the pricing alone!

KDE should run fine on those specs, I would try to replace the hard drive, I had one of those slow down a Laptop to a point where I almost threw it away but with a new one everything worked fine again. If it doesn’t I would say as a beginner Linux Mint with ether XFCE or Mate should be a great choice but I doubt you need it with those specs tbh!

I bet the dev gets a lot of angry comments over that, a absolute hero!

Lucky you, those idiots are fucking everywhere!

It can mess with configs, themes and some other annoying stuff so I never did it again but there is no big risk or anything, it’s just a little tedious to fix small things afterwards!

Did you read my comment at all? Flatpak and Snap share dependencies while Appimage doublicates all of them so unless you have no big dependencies on your system (literally impossible with Linux systems) Flatpaks and Snaps become more efficient in terms of storage usage the more you use them because they share big parts while Appimage still dublicates every single dependency because it’s a single binarie with everything in it…