11 inch screen, so packed pretty tight. Openbox with tint2, left half of the top bar is conky. The bargraph that shows “Mem” is dynamic, it alternates between Mem/Swap/HD. I think the background image is from LXDE’s very nice collection of wallpapers.

Sakura. I recently did a little survey of what was on hand for Debian Stable, and that’s the one I liked best. The most important thing to me is right-click paste, because I do that incessantly.

I use GNOME (under Fedora) on a laptop that sits at my right hand side, so I use it with only one hand. Using three-finger swipe to change workspaces is awesome - I usually use a workspace for each app, or sometimes two apps share a workspace, but I don’t worry about which one they are on, it’s so easy I just swipe until I find the one I want.

I use an extension to auto-reveal the dock when I go to the bottom of the screen. The default behavior of going to the top left of the screen, only to traverse all the way down to the dock at the bottom (or the right for workspaces), just seems really inefficient, especially on a touchpad.

I had it all tricked out with other extensions but they keep breaking with new GNOME releases, so I’ve mostly given up on that.

Sparky is a very nice lightweight Debian-based distro.

“Arch-based” distros are problematic because of Arch’s rolling release model; if the distro maintainer has their own repo overlaid on Arch, they have to be very attentive to keeping them in sync, and most of them aren’t. So I wouldn’t recommend going that route.