Seriously, gnome, KDE or xfce, I think you can’t go wrong. Matter of personal taste first then you discover individual features and underlying libraries etc.
Edit: if you want to customize your desktop probably nothing beats KDE. I have to admit 
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KDE for me has nothing to do with customization. I install it, i use it. I change very little. I just install software that i want to use. It doesn’t look like or work like Windows. It’s EndeavourOS BTW!
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So KDE or Gnome , will try both for few days and decide 
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I also use Plasma as it fell out of the bag. At best, I still turn on the dark mode, but I’m not so sure about that yet either. Switch to the bright mode every now and then … everything is still not really consistent …
KDE has been very consistent on my hardware but so has every other desktop when installed on bare metal. The only issues i have usually are in vm due to updates to the packages and or mesa. I don’t believe i have ever had kernel issues. I don’t use lts kernels unless I’m forced to by the distro of choice. Back when i used Mint i always used the mainline kernels without issue. For me KDE is more about it being Plasma than KDE. It’s just very smooth, fast and fluid. Doesn’t matter if I’m building a package, a kernel or an ISO. It just works.
One more question, what about fractional scaling and external monitor support ?
And if I want one resolution on my laptop and second on ext. monitor ?
You have misunderstood me. By inconsistent, I didn’t mean Plasma, but the inconsistency of dark mode, which is why I switch back to light mode from time to time. And that doesn’t refer to the dark surface of Plasma, but the way websites invert the colors (sometimes horribly unset). The dark theme of EOS in Plasma is already quite good.
In my opinion, this is solved quite well in Plasma. I have a 25 " monitor with QHD resolution and also have to scale. You can do that with Plasma using multipliers in %.
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Okay…yes i did misunderstand you. I usually use the light mode on Firefox. I have my plasma task bar set as translucent. Global Theme is Breeze Dark EndeavourOS, Icons Breeze. I have Firefox theme set to colorway dreamer balanced. This is good for me.
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Cinnamon is the best with the different monitors/scaling.
You’re going to eventually find one that fits your liking best, but all DEs are really good these days.
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Gnome Wayland works well for that. But that would be 100 and 200 % scaling for example for a normal and high dpi screen. Cinnamon works too but I often had graphical glitches especially with Nvidia and fractional scaling.
KDE just does global scaling, unless they finally implemented the variable per screen scaling. Maybe that’s something that works only well in Wayland.
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These days, starting out (again) without worrying about partition schemes and swap can be a lot simpler than it used to be. The general trend seems to be going towards the BTRFS filesystem - and with only EFI (the boot) and root (the system), for beginners.
If you’ve got a whole drive (with no data you want to keep) to spare for a virgin install, just choose it in the installer, choose “erase disk”, and “btrfs” as the file system, and “no swap” - and the installer will create subvolumes and take care of the rest.
After the first boot you can open the terminal and follow this guide, it will take care of swap for you. Zram works nicely with snapshots, which lets you restore the system in seconds:
Htop can be installed with the terminal.
Then, I suggest you google something like “Timeshift +EndeavorOS”, and then google something like “ext4 vs btrfs”. You can read up on those, and partitions and swap, in peace and quiet. Good luck and welcome!
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I rather like MATE. But you do need to like old school DEs that don’t try to look like smart phones.
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I would suggest trying several DEs to which you would like best. Personally I like mate, enlightenment, xfce, and also openbox which is not a DE but a window manager. As a matter of fact, I prefer openbox over all of them.
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It’s more like: I hate it the least. Plasma is far from perfect, but at least it’s not GNOME… But what I really love about it is the default terminal emulator, Konsole, and the text editor, Kate.
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@Brtza
What hardware did you end up selecting on the new laptop?
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- TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 16 - Gen7 - Workstation Edition
- Omnia Display | 2560 x 1600 | 16:10 | 90Hz
- Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 (96EUs) | Black casing
- Intel Core i7-12700H (max. 4.70GHz 14-Cores, 20 Threads, 24MB Cache, 45W TDP)
- 16 GB (1x 16GB) 3200Mhz CL22 Samsung
- 16 GB (1x 16GB) 3200Mhz CL22 Samsung
- 500 GB Samsung 980 PRO (NVMe PCIe 4.0)
- without M.2 SSD 2
- Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 Series (802.11ax | 2,4 & 5 GHz | Bluetooth 5.2)
After all , I didnt want to go with Nvidia for my needs iGPU will be fine , and I hope so , less issues witj Linux
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Looks very nice. Loads of power, lots of ram, very fast m.2 drive, faster newer WiFi standard so if hooked to WiFi that is AX standard such as newer router it will be be good speed. Intel Iris Xe graphics is capable. Supposedly Intel is working on a newer driver for Iris Xe that will separate it from the older graphics chips and newer Intel Arc graphics is supposed to be open source kernel module.
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Yes, I hope I decided ok. It looks awesome, also really lightweight
I can upgrade more ram and ssd. Warranty for 3 y so I think I will be fine.
Only thinking should I go with additional ssd , second one or one is ok ?
That’s up to you. Does the second m.2 slot run Pci-e 3.0 like most? Pci-e 3.0 is slower read and write speeds compared to Samsung 980 Pro or the new Samsung 990 Pro or Western Digital Black SN850X which are Pci-e 4.0 Pci-e 4.0 spec has twice the bandwidth of Pci-e 3.0 But they are still significantly faster than any SSD by a massive margin. An extra drive would be handy. You can always put a Pci-e 4.0 m.2 drive in that slot i would assume. It will just run max at the specs it is rated even though the drive is capable of faster read and write times.