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KDE uses a system tray for various status indicators, so that's probably what you're looking for. You should know that on Linux the OS and the desktop environment are modular components. You can have multiple DEs and choose which one you want to log into. You can try different DEs, in parallel, without reinstalling your entire OS. It will still be the same OS/file system underneath. All you have to do is find and install the corresponding desktop environment packages in your package manager.
KDE is probably the most feature-rich DE, though depending on the specific distro it may not have the entire range of KDE applications installed by default. Your distro should have KDE group packages like "kdebase", "kdegames", "kdeutils", etc, which provided groups of applications based on functional areas. I recommend these over installing every application individually, and you can always trim down later if there are things you don't need.
There are other DEs, like XFCE and LXQt, but most of them are geared around minimalism or creating a specific look/feel and don't have the feature depth of KDE.
GUI file manager should be no problem in any DE/distro, though you will be limited in what you can edit from your user account (please don't run as root for normal use).
As far as desktop icons, most DEs favor an organized application launcher over icons. Do you use desktop icons more for launching applications or for opening files?
As for retaining your settings, my recommendation would be to create
/homeas a separate partition from/(root) when you do your OS install. All of your user configuration and your files will be in /home, which gives you the freedom to reformat and reinstall the OS in / without affecting your user files (when you run the OS installer, you'll need to manually configure the partitions, then tell it to use the existing /home but not format it). This also adds some safety for your personal files in case you are making changes to the OS and you end up breaking it - you can just replace it without losing your stuff.Also if you're considering running multiple distros (Fedora, Debian, Arch, w/e), you can give each of them a separate root partition and have them all use the same /home partition, so your files will be available in all of them. In this case I recommend also making a separate /boot partition, which would be shared across all distros.
I use gui more for file management. I dont like using the terminal for that since I have to remember everything constantly.
Why isnt the /home separate from /root by default? Frankly I dont see any benefits from it being in there.
Also, what is your opinion on kubuntu vs fedora regarding this? I'm quite torn between them, kubuntu seems nice and easy to use but I fear its developers might do stupid decisions if they are already annoying people with the snaps. Fedora seems more secure but it might require a lot of tinkering to get things to work and might be more prone to problems that need troubleshooting.
Because then you either waste free space for root or completely fill it up and can't install any native packages easily.
Well of course. The only time terminal is really useful for file management is when you want to do mass operations (e.g. find all filenames that match a pattern and rename them with another pattern) or when you're managing a remote/headless system.
It complicates the setup process to make multiple partitions. Generally speaking I wouldn't want an automated process to mess with partitioning a drive for me, I would either be satisfied with the basic single-partition setup or else set up the partitions manually.
If you do set up your partitions manually, make sure you create a swap partition of at minimum 2GB, though if you plan to use hibernation you'll need enough swap to store your entire RAM contents, plus additional space for the swap itself.
Your OS partition doesn't need to be all that big, Linux tends to be pretty efficient. 30GB is probably enough to provide room for growth.
I used Kubuntu for many years, but I don't really like the recent changes in Ubuntu, especially the move away from standard repository package management in favor of snaps.
Fedora is a solid choice, and may be particularly useful if you plan to do anything career-wise with Linux. There's a lot of RedHat/Fedora/CentOS in industrial and enterprise computing.
Personally I've recently started using EndeavourOS, and I'm pretty happy with it so far. It's an Arch variant, but designed to be useful out-of-the-box. The only thing I miss occasionally is Synaptic, there really isn't anything comparably competent for any of the non-Debian distros unfortunately.