“rough start” is putting it mildly. 🤭

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.

Lightweight? I guess things have changed in the last 15+ years… I personally settled on Sayonara. Then I discovered Nuclear. Still undecided.

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.