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...

Well, that's your choice, I like and use Flatpaks but noone has to do so!

Have you ever touched a Google phone? You CAN'T uninstalled preinstalled apps on ether of them, if you don't root your device third party app stores suck, the law allows you to get rid of preinstalled bloat, messager interoperability is included and so on, that's a huge law and the first against silicon valley giants with enforcment that will actually hurt them!

Appimage literally requires more storage for the apps because it dublicates all dependencies so in terms of storage flatpak and dnaps win by FAR, there are valid reasons to criticize all three but your comment is a sad joke!

They literally ad d ed the tagging function on images to improve their facial detection so I doubt that this is a surprise to anyone!

Fuck, the NSO group managed that shit again?!

Cool, a consol OS like SteamOS is one of the best usecases for immutable Linux, just a perfect match!

There is a Matrix bridge bot for Discord but the server owner has to set that up on the Discord and Matrix side first

Well, everybody is entitled to a own opinion but I highly recommend that Internet Historian video because you certainly don't seem to understand the degree of garbage they did with Fallout 76, I am definitely happy they don't force there launcher anymore tho!

Wine and DXVK made it increadably easy to support Linux and if a company doesn't even put in that much effort or intentionally breaks the game for you it's certainly not worth your money! I pirate rather than use the refund window but the principal is the same since I do buy good games after all.

Yes, a LOT of things! Fallout76 is the worse example (the internet historian video about it is good), Fallout 4 to some extend, the endless rereleases of Skyrim with no additional value, their shitty launcher, their constant selling of rippoff merch and so on. It's a terribke company that was good ages ago and still profits from their prior reputation, well and now it's owned by Microsoft too!