I’m an old coot and comes from preGUI area. My first unix experience were on 80x25 amber terminal. Then X came, I used mwm/twm/fvwm and things like this, it was very tricky to configure to your taste, mainly with config file, you wanted your xeyes, xload, xbiff, xclock etc at this place, transparent, no border, etc, very complicated. Linux didn’t exist.
Then Windows came… and kind of dominated the world with win3/95/98/etc. and at the time linux desktop were still not perfect + you had all kind of driver problems/missing.
As a lot of people I was used to windows GUI so I chose Xfce (also because France). Simple GUI, a button menu bottom left, an app bar, and systray icons and clock bottom right. Don’t need anything else.
I tried LFS, Arch, Cinnamon Mint, I tried Ubuntu, I tried tile, but nah, the simpler the better, Xfce it is.
I am using MX Linux for years now, Debian based, always up to date, .deb packages, no systemd, no snap, no flatpak.
I don’t trust the online one, I only use https://pwsafe.org/