My preferred setup for over a decade has been Debian or CentOS with xmonad, so no desktop environment. For me, xmonad has just clicked with my workflow. I typ

My preferred setup for over a decade has been Debian or CentOS with xmonad, so no desktop environment. For me, xmonad has just clicked with my workflow. I typically use the command line, Chrome, SQLDeveloper (my workplace is an Oracle shop), and Emacs (usually attached to a Clojure repl). Our server environment is all headless Linux with a couple of exceptions for exporting X over ssh for Java-based ETL tools. So the match between my dev env and our deployment env means I don't "context switch" when moving between them. A benefit of the no-desktop-env approach is that I have found that I typically install the bare minimum of utilities, so there is less to go wrong. Even installing a big Nvidia blob for my GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER just worked. If you find yourself happily using a small number of utilities in any Linux environment, you might find a similar setup rewarding.