KDE.

My advice: try them all, then decide. They are all free. Most offer live systems. It will only cost you time, which will be well spent learning.

tl;dr: Break things and have fun.

KDE has given me the desktop I need for the past few years. Hyprland isn’t a desktop environment, as far as I know.

Before KDE I used Cinnamon on Linux Mint. It was functional, but after many years I wanted a change.

Use whatever suits your needs. In my experience, KDE and Cinnamon are the most complete desktop environments without having to install extensions or extra software. Both are mature, have large communities behind them, and release incremental updates frequently. Those are my criteria for a good desktop environment.

And that’s why I don’t use flatpaks. Nothing like that has ever happened to me.

As other have said, a combination of Firefox PDF tool, PDF Arranger and Xournal++ is all I’ve ever needed. And Okular is nowadays my viewer of choice, which does a lot on its own, too.

KDE.

It would be easier to just try the live systems (booting from USB).

Changed to Cinnamon (Linux Mint) after GNOME 3 and Ubuntu’s Unity went bonkers, then changed to KDE Plasma some years ago.

I think KDE is constantly working to improve the desktop paradigm. GNOME tried to change the paradigm… I didn’t like what I saw. I’m too old to learn new tricks.

When they’re ready.

KDE. Because of its simplicity. Unsarcastically.

Short answer: yes, and that’s a good thing.

Slightly longer answer: it’s a sign of maturity for the most popular distributions and of the platforms at large. Innovation tends to happen in the fringes. Being it free software, someone can always fork the software and add their new ideas to the mix.

Nowadays I’m trying omnivore.app, also Feeder on Android and Pocket for good measure.

I will try the trick changing the default browser, thanks!

I think it’s a bug. I can’t login either. I’m on manjaro.

Windows.

If I teach them, they’ll find it boring. Better to be a role model and answer questions if they have them.

Manjaro/KDE/Plasma

I don’t use Wayland. I can. I’ve tried, but I went back to X. On Wayland, when I take a Firefox tab out of a window to make it it’s own window, there’s a pause of over a second until the new window appears. It drives me crazy every time. On X it’s instantaneous.

I don’t use two monitors, I don’t use Nvidia. For everything else I use my computer for, I haven’t found an advantage of using Wayland over X. So, I’ll stay on X until I’m forced to change, I guess.

Software and videogames. I use Linux and Free/Libre Software and any game I want is on steam or gog.

Me too. 🙌