I’m a retired Unix admin. I’ve been using Linux since I installed Slackware 3.1 from several boxes of 1.44MB diskettes. But, working in a corporate environment with lots of M$ Office requirements meant that my work desktop has always been Windows. I know it sounds crazy, but I was really hesitant to switch to away from Windows - I guess after 30+ years I’d developed a bit of Stockholm syndrome. But, Copilot and the looming Recall were enough to push me over the edge.
Anyway - I spent a while making sure I got all my data off OneDrive etc. and then installed Debian 12 with LXDE - my laptop is an older i7 with 16GB of RAM, but lightweight and minimal really appeals to me. Everything just worked and I was happy for a day or two. Then I started noticing video tearing - especially on my 2nd monitor. I did a bit of research and found a suggestion to enable TearFree in the X11 configuration - X wouldn’t even start when I did that. So, I did some more reading and now think I understand that the lightweight window managers don’t have vsync and this causes the tearing. Apparently the real solution is to use a compositing window manager (I don’t understand what that means…) with OpenGL. Oh well, I can’t have minimal lightweight - so, I installed KDE. It’s very clean and no video tearing. I still don’t have it doing power management for my monitors the way I want, but other than that - I’m very happy. It was noticeably sluggish compared to LXDE, but I’m used to that already after only a day.
It’s only been a few days, but I have not regretted the switch for one second.
If you like screen or tmux, you might like a tiling window manager like i3 or sway, or GNOME with paperwm extension. It can have real advantages for older folks (like me) which don’t have perfect vision any more, because it is much more conservative with screen space. After a few days learning, it becomes also really fast to switch windows and desktops. This is not black-or-white: The desktop WMs do have keyboard shortcuts and windows layouts which mimick tiling WMs, and tiling WMs may have a few desktop features. The former are a bit more convenient and easy for beginners, while the latter are blazingly fast.
I’ve thought about trying a tiling window manager, but I don’t think I’d get the benefit. I don’t really do a lot these days and normally just have one or two things going concurrently and with two screens that’s trivial to layout.
The main thing I struggle with (with my old eyes) is things like Firefox that override the normal window manager decorations - I find the edges get lost and they blend into each other. A tiling window manager would help with this, but I just turned off Firefox’s ability to do that.