Look at the reddit called "unixporn" and search for Xfce. You ll see what's possible with Xfce. For me the KDE crashes are a dealbreaker. My Xfce setup is so simplified, that nothing can be ugly. I use Bspwm for the windows and stripped down Xfce panel (dont touch third party status bars, such as polybar, its waste of time if you already have Xfce). No menu such as Whisker menu, but Rofi instead. I got Xfce stability without the old looking.
Drito
After tried Alpine, NixOS, Archlinux...finally Im on MX linux because this is a no brain distro and I'm tired to search how to make things to work.
You can also use a light browser such as Qutebrowser.
If you are in sciences, and happy to learn a new PL, I think you ll enjoy functional programming, even if it is not the most popular way. https://ocaml.org/docs/is-ocaml-gui-yet
The website looks cool.
There is nothing better than Xfce, if you dont like the desktop, at least Xfce allows you to customize. KDE seems interesting, but the last time i tried it, 10 years ago more or less, it was a bit buggy.
I prefer a glibc replacement.
Have you tried Mac OS ? It is probably more polished than distros and less enshittified than Windows.
IMHO distros share the same apps. The defaults can differ, the implementations too but the user can install apps that are on other distros.
I m not experienced but this video shows a way to use pass.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7t5M4FXqs9E&pp=ygUWZ2l0IHBsdXMgY29tbWFuZCBsaW5lIA%3D%3D
Reddit is unified, Lemmy has a small layer of complexity on top and "sh.itjust.works" is a weird name, maybe the Lemmy system drives to such complicated names. Its not a big deal but I add that to the other causes.