I mainly use Debian stable and Xfce, the latter of has a few annoying issues.  I bought a cheap windows box, and hoped to use it as a work machine as you have described.  But I have networking issues and other annoyances with my Intel wireless card.  Bluetooth falls over as soon as the machine hits suspend, and when I loose WIFI signal, only a reboot recovers. Windows 8.1 is a crapfest, and it feels like a botched together repackaged version of Windows (the UI and admin UI is horrible).  My Debian box is far more reliable.  Anyway the grass isn&#x27;t always greener...  I remember when the Linux desktop space was really exciting and innovating.  I&#x27;m still after something better.