[downtide]

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't always greener... I remember when the Linux desktop space was really exciting and innovating. I'm still after something better.