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!

I think a lot of people dislike Ubuntu because of Gnome and Snaps, which is weird to me. You can fairly easily change desktop environment and most Snaps have apt or Flatpak alternatives.

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.

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.

Out of curiosity, do you ever rescue laptops from your work and use or resell them?

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

RISC is going to change everything.

Not OP, but I've been running Kubuntu since 2017 since it's desktop environment looks and works very similar to Windows 7 (desktop with icons, taskbar, launcher, search, options, etc) which is what I was used to after running Windows for two decades before. It's also stable and sees a lot of mainstream apps being ported to it.