For easy setup and a choice between Plasma and Gnome, I'm partial to Manjaro. Its pretty lightweight pleasant to use, only change from Ubuntu is that it doesn't use the apt package manager, but its an easy switch.

Dear god, please do not recommend arch to people without telling them what to expect...

OP: With Arch, expect to spend a couple hours setting it up before seeing a GUI, and be ready for periodic system-breaking updates which have to be resolved.

I'm a PhD candidate in inorganic and biochemistry! Loving the chem representation here, and loving OP's username.

Yeah, I'll miss r/3dprinting, do we know if there's a 3d printing community anywhere in the fediverse yet?

How did I not know about bangs til now, I've been using DDG for years! I've just been relying on the @ codes in the Firefox search bar, which are super limited. Thanks for the tip!

DDG actually uses Bing's search indexing last time I checked! Startpage uses Google's, which the major difference between them. Brave does its own thing, I think.

Oh absolutely! Them collecting less personal data (it's reddit, so unfortunately its due to incompetence rather than altruism) is good! I agree that anonymityits a double-edged sword, though.

The cynical side of me says that's because they dont collect as much personal data as FB, or aren't as good at extrapolating invasive details from it...