Although I use sway, I used KDE for a long time and XFCE prior. They’re both phenomenal. I’d love to see XFCE make its way to wayland in the future.
As an aside, I feel like Wayland has a market ripe for the introduction of lightweight DEs. Sure, it has the very lightweight (hyprland, sway, river, dwl) and heavyweight (KDE, Gnome) but nothing between like XFCE, LXDE or MATE
Thinkpad e14 w/ ryzen 5500u
Not the perfect solution, my main PC is in storage currently. The thinkpad does everything I need it to. I can play age of empires 2 and 4, company of heroes 2, doom wads and WoW private servers. In fact, its managed to have good performance in every game ive tried save for Elden Ring and some AAA games.
gentoo!
i love the versatility it offers, but it’s very much so DIY. it has great documentation. anyone who considers themselves a “linux enthusiast” should try an install in a VM at some point or another, if nothing else it’s a great learning experience.
for gaming in particular: flatpak steam / lutris / bottles. it’s great because it’s completely distro agnostic. i can take the $USER/.var directory and put it on any distro with flatpak installed and it’ll just work.
Kvantun for qt themes and lxappearance for gtk themes. In either one you’d have to first download a theme you want and apply it via correct program. You may have to export a shell variable to tell programs to actually use that theme (may not be necessary, I use a lot of flatpaks so for me it is)
The easiest way to get uniform colors in my experience is to full screen a program running the theme, use a dropper tool in Kolourpaint, see the hex color for what I want to change, then search for that hex in the theme file and change it to the one that matches my rice.