The Steam Deck was an amazing purchase for me. I put on EmuDeck and a bunch of ROMs and can play those from the Steam interface while also playing many of my Steam games and it's now a great all-arounder.

Once Windows got rid of the gorgeous Aero theme starting in Windows 8, plus the shitty UI/UX that Windows got again starting in Windows 8, pushed me to Linux.

• Black Lagoon
• Slayers
• Canaan
• Kara no Kyoukai
• Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex
• Hellsing Ultimate
• Outlaw Star
• Jojo's Bizarre Adventure

That would be my list.

Honestly because it's quite customizable, that's about it. Being able to customize my software to look and work the way I want them to is a big reason why I use certain programs over others.

EndeavourOS as the distro of choice for easy installation and AUR access.

Depending on the DE, if it's not MATE, I almost always install Caja, Engrampa, and MATE Calculator since they just have the most sane look and UX to them for my use cases.

• Waterfox as my browser of choice (reason over Firefox is that it offers tabs below address bar as an option in Preferences rather than mucking about in userChrome.css files that often break on updates)
• Vivaldi as a secondary browser for websites that only render right in Chromium
• Kitty as my terminal of choice.
• Clementine as my music player of choice
• yt-dlp for downloading Youtube videos as mp3s
• htop over top, also have gotop for a more graphical look
• exa over ls

MATE as is or Xfce with some MATE software (swapping Thunar for Caja, swapping the XFCE calculator program for MATE's calculator, using Engrampa instead of whatever Xfce uses for a file archive manager, etc.). I like things simple and following roughly the same paradigm that I've used for years.

And for the love of god, PLEASE KEEP MENU BARS AS THEY WERE IN THE PAST! Stop removing menu bars from programs in favor of "hamburger buttons" or whatever nonsense modern programs like to use! That's honestly one of my biggest gripes with "modern" software, they keep changing the paradigm to something that I haven't used and I can't be bothered to relearn everything.

Been using kitty for a while now, though honestly any terminal emulator works for me.

Nope, never learned. I'm 31 in the US. Never had the need to learn as I was raised with automatics only.

Plays somewhat well, but I get an amdgpu gfx_timeout crash within seconds of starting the Baltheus fight. This is apparently a known issue with the game itself (something about shaders not being calculated properly, which given the boss has a ton of particle effects, makes sense) so I'll have to wait til that gets fixed. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/7045#issuecomment-1693816570

Apparently there's been a patch made here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/7045#issuecomment-1697542953 so I'll try that out.

The Caja file manager. Hell the MATE desktop environment in general is just perfect for me. Xfce is acceptable too, though the inclusion of CSD in recent Xfce releases has made me a bit more wary of it when it comes to theming.

I also use Waterfox as my browser. A Firefox fork that has the option to put tabs below address bar (where they belong imo) out of the box without needing to muck around with the userChrome.css file.