Are you talking about Manjaro KDE or XFCE?
XFCE. It loads in seconds compared to OpenSuse, firefox seems much faster as well in loading pages. It just seems to zip along!
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Well that is XFCE vs. KDE not OpenSUSE vs. Manjaro
XFCE is a light weight DE while KDE is a fully loaded one.
Has anyone used Puppy Linux before? Or any other quaint or unique distros?
I use Win 10 on my desktop, Xubuntu 16.04 on my wife’s ancient laptop.
I decided on Xubuntu when Canonical went with Unity several years back. I’ve found it to be the best compromise of functionality, organization, and lightness for me, so I’ve stuck with it ever since. I guess technically, my laptop uses GalliumOS, since it’s a converted Chromebook. But Gallium is a very tight fork of Xubuntu with just a few small tweaks to make life easier on a Chromebook, so I don’t really see it as different.
Did I mention that I like Xubuntu? 
maybe try XFCE on openSUSE 
we ship that too.
I tend to gravitate to XFCE because of its snappiness. LXDE is okay too. Speaking of snappiness, in my university days, I had a prof who used Slack. Looked like he disabled the GUI but at a command could open a PDF or do something graphical without any delay whatsoever. He also played the banjo and, one time during a lecture, his false nail flew off his hand due to an abrupt gesture and landed on my desk. Fun times.
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I have heard from someone that XFCE is near the end of its lifetime because it is based on an old technology. Is this true?
Must be old news. It was based on GTK2 and GTK has moved to GTK3, but as far as I can tell XCFE has been moved to GTK3 (Gimp is still in GTK2…).
I thought Qt5 is the future…
I just tried OpenSUSE TW with XFCE and liked it. I could not find a good dark theme though…
Manjaro (Arch derivative).
AUR (The Arch User repository) is where I get gimp-git, photoflow-git etc easily.
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Me not being a coder, just a user of Linux for over ten years, I’ve done distro hopping a few years ago but have settled on Linux Lite.
I don’t know if this can be classed as @afre quaint distro.
As the name suggests it’s light and only requires 500 mb of ram, and is based on Ubuntu LTS but is built from the base up.
Promoted as the easiest OS for people migrating from windows, BUT,
It is much more than that, it is rock solid, lightning fast and just does everything I require.
I will have to re-try openSUSE and Manjaro. I was impressed with them when I last tried them.
Good to have the choice 
I installed XFCE in my OpenSUSE after reading your post few days ago and noticed that I boot in XFCE all the time now. It looks a bit old but it is fast and it just gets out of my way letting me focus on my photos and videos. Thank you for sharing the info!
Happily using Ubuntu Mate 17.04 I have dabbled with other os’s in the past, but I always seem to fall back to Ubuntu.
Having said that I’m thinking about buying a cheap refurbished laptop for when I’m on holidays for photo backup, which by the looks of it will run Windows of one form or the other…
It’s not because the PC has Windows pre-installed that you have to use it. Pre-installed Windows is like the plastic foil on the screen of your new smartphone. You have to remove it to unleash the power…
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@Ofnuts, I’ll probably keep windows on the refurbished laptop, as it’ll be handy for things like updating satnavs etc, and running Anquet mapping software, which seems to be nigh on impossible on Linux…
Thanks I will look at that.
Hi Andrius
I’m still wet behind the ears re Linux! How do I install XFCE and replace KDE. I went to YAST Software Management, under Package Groups I found XFCE Desktop but it didn’t select any packages. Which ones do I select and then how do change desktops? Sorry for being such a noob!