… until you notice that there is again a bug in the very same library that isn’t likely going to be fixed in your “stable” distribution: “GTK+ versions 3.24.2 - 3.24.6 have an issue where combobox menu scroll-arrows are missing when the combobox list does not fit vertically on the screen. As a result, users would not be able to scroll in the following comboboxes: Processing Profiles, Film Simulation, and the camera and lens profiles in Profiled Lens Correction.” In fact it is worse, you only get any entries in those comboboxes on first use, they’re empty later. I’ll try the appImage for RT now …
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Anyhoo, that’s Mint 19.3 Cinnamon installed again 
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And Kubuntu 19.10 installed now…
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Stop it, you sound like me last year 
Though I used Void Linux for quite a while. Really like it it, but doing everything manually… ugh. Admittedly it’s better than Arch (IMO) and no systemd.
Interesting that you had issues with Manjaro KDE, I had issues with Manjaro Gnome spin: after an update gnome was severely broken, so went back to the “community” Manjaro i3 version; it’s the stablest system I’ve ever used.
Key lesson: stay away from bloated DE, and stick to simple WM solutions! 
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Distro hopping is so much fun it actually makes you forget that you got a PC to get some things done. Focusing on these things helps dealing with the distrohop fever though. At least it helped me.
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I used darktable in Windows recently to see if the OpenCL made a difference - it certainly did (I have AMD A10 combined processor and graphics and so can’t acess OpenCL in linux). Last week I installed KDE Neon on a spare drive. For some reason darktable appeared to be much quicker than in Kubuntu. I haven’t done any serious testing but that was the impression I got. Will stick with Kubuntu though, it does everything I need.
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My concern about KDE Neon, is that an update to KDE may break it!
Anyway, only a few weeks till Kubuntu 20.04 is released!
Even though I have no reason to touch/reinstall my system I have just created a spin of Debian 11 with AwesomeWM as only desktop environment.
http://betazoid.bplaced.net/lilac/2020/04/debian-11-awesome-spin/
Actually it is more something like an own distro because it has a custom configuration of AwesomeWM and a wallpaper but unfortunately I was not able to change the name of the OS.
It is super lightweight although if you have unfree hardware you might have to install additional proprietary firmware packages. It only includes a few additional packages such as lightdm, geany, or gparted. The installer is calamares. It finishes the installation with an error, nevertheless the system should be installed on your hd/ssd. You can start calamares from xterm (Super+Enter) with “sudo calamares”.
I think this might be something useful, especially for people who like lightweight systems and don’t want a “bloated” DE. I might actually use it if my system breaks. However so far I could only test it in a VM and a live USB stick.
Btw, I am planning to create more spins (with photography and graphics software etc.) eventually.
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Is AwesomeWM still slow? That was the only thing I didn’t like about it.
Also you should have xiicd start as a user service so you can have color managed screens.
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I did not notice any slowness so far.
I am not sure about xiccd. I will have a closer look at it, however for color management I prefer dispwin (-X). But this system is still very minimal, the only app that is started with awesome is nm-applet.
AwesomeWM slow??? I’ve been using it at home and at work for a couple of years because it’s so light and fast. I’ve heard lots of complaints about awesomewm, but speed is not one of them.
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I don’t think it was slow when I used it, but when I switched to i3, I realized that opening a terminal was noticibly faster in i3 than in awesome.
But i left awesome because they kept breaking my config release after release 
http://betazoid.bplaced.net/lilac/2020/06/bullseye-awesome-photo-spin/
As promised. At the moment I am using it myself.
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Im currently using Fedora 32 Cinnamon spin and I am really happy with it, I do on occasion use Debian or Ubuntu but I am mainly a Fedora user.
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Interesting! Does the AwesomeWM support colour management?
I think I’ll stick with Linux Mint Cinnamon though (which seems to be working better for me than Kubuntu!)
Does not support color management directly but that’s no problem. You can set the profile with ArgyllCMS or Displaycal.
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Perhaps I’ve been getting conflicts between the profile I loaded under the Gnome Colour Manager on Cinnamon, and the profile which is getting loaded by Displaycal. :- 
Might be worthwhile for me to just use either Displaycal or Gnome Colour Manager to set profiles, but not both!
I’ve managed to get into this situation!
[brian@Giger ~]$ darktable-cmstest
darktable-cmstest version 3.0.2
this executable was built with colord support enabled
darktable itself was built with colord support enabled
primary CRTC is at CRTC 0
CRTC for screen 0 CRTC 1 has no mode or no output, skipping
DVI-D-0 the X atom and colord returned different profiles
X atom: _ICC_PROFILE (545576 bytes)
description: BenQ LCD #1 2020-02-13 16-59 120cdm2 2.2 VF-F XYZLUT+MTX
colord: “/home/brian/.local/share/icc/BGR-Wcs-RBG-Icc-Test.icc”
description: Microsoft BGR Test Profile - for testing only - ICC profile is ordered RBG, embedded WCS profile will correctly render a BGR image
Better check your system setup
some monitors reported different profiles
You may experience inconsistent color rendition between color managed applications
Complicated stuff!
You only need to configure the X atom. All color managed apps use x Atom and not colord. You don’t need to mees with colord. Displaycal/ArgyllCMS configure the X atom. Only darktable can use colord if you explicitly configure it to do that.
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That makes sense. Normally I would set the same profile under both Displaycal app and the gnome colour manager app. I was just testing to see what would happen if I set different profiles for Displaycal and the Gnome Colour manager app.
At least just using Displaycal gives me more options with regards to a desktop environment
Lol. I tried Kubuntu 20.04 again.
It ended up using 1.3gb of my GPU’s 8Gb of VRAM! I’m too much of a tight fisted Scotsman to want to waste 1.3gb of vram to run KDE Plasma! So, while I reinstalled Cinnamon via timeshift, the search continues for a different distro / Desktop Environment.