Linux Desktop

My choice: CachyOS (Arch Linux) with GNOME DE

• CachyOS is tweaked for performance, has a GUI installer + easy disk encryption setup
• GNOME looks shiny and can easily be stripped down to avoid bloat

Awesome Software

File Manager:

• Thunar: very lightweight 50MB RAM
• Dolphin: best feature set
  • supports showing dir size bytes
  • supports sftp (ssh remote access)
• PCManFM

Code Editor:

• Zed: fast + lightweight (similar to VS Code)
• Marko: WYSIWYG markdown editor

Media Player:

• VLC
• mpv

PW Manager:

• KeePassXC

Terminal:

• ghostty: fast
• guake (drop down terminal)

Shell:

• ZSH + ZEAL

Process Monitor:

• NeoHtop / Neop (my fork)
• Mission Center
• Glances

Useful Daemons:

• Syncthing
• IPFS

Tweaks & more:

• ananicy-cpp: prevents system slow down on high disk usage (CachyOS ships with it)
• OpenZFS: durable file system with useful features

Honorable Mentions

Distros:

• Fedora
  • Nobara (optimized for gaming / streaming)
• Debian (solid)
• Ubuntu Server (solid)

Desktop Envs:

• KDE Plasma
• HyprLand
• XFCE

Dishonorable Mentions

Many GNOME apps are RAM hogs while providing little functionality, I recommend to uninstall: nautilus, gnome-software, gnome-contacts, gnome-terminal
Avoid oh-my-zsh it is bloated and slow.
Budgie DE is a buggy shit show.

TO TRY

• XFCE: promising low resource DE (though no wayland support yet)
• NixOS

#coding