You made a point of mentioning that you decided to forgo an HDD for an SSD. Any particular reason why?
For media playback, an HDD should be plenty fast, even for video. It seems to me that the SSD doesn't give you a technical advantage for this particular application. But it costs more.
If you later decide to expand this media collection something bigger (e.g. ripping your DVDs for video streaming), you'll quickly find that 2TB isn't enough. You can get an enterprise-grade 16TB hard drive for a reasonable price (about $600 for the drive, plus a USB enclosure), but 16TB of SSD storage would be much more expensive.
I've been using XFCE for quite a while. It is my personal standard desktop these days - when setting up new Linux boxes/VMs, I use the "Xubuntu" distribution, which is Ubuntu with XFCE installed as the default destkop.
I've never liked the heavyweight desktops like Gnome/Unity. I started using Unix systems back when it was a choice between the twm or mwm window managers. The most "advanced" window manager I used for a long time was the "fvwm" window manager, which allowed me a certain amount of customization.
Ordinarily, I would be happy to stick with fvwm, except that it is too stripped-down for a modern Linux installation. More specifically, things like USB storage devices are really awkward, because you need to manually figure out the device name and how to mount their volumes - something modern desktops with file managers do automatically.
XFCE fills that gap beautifully. It discovers and auto-mounts removable media, so I don't have to think about attaching thumb drives and SD cards. But its memory and CPU footprint is still very small.
My only disappointment is that the most recent versions did away with support for Gnome 2 themes. My favorite theme is the old "crux" look, which is not available for the latest XFCE distributions (including the one bundled with Xubuntu 20.04 and later). But that's a minor gripe. On those boxes, I have switched to the "clearlooks-phenix" theme (https://github.com/jpfleury/clearlooks-phenix), which has the old legacy scroll-bar behavior that modern themes don't seem to use anymore.
Authored Comments
You made a point of mentioning that you decided to forgo an HDD for an SSD. Any particular reason why?
For media playback, an HDD should be plenty fast, even for video. It seems to me that the SSD doesn't give you a technical advantage for this particular application. But it costs more.
If you later decide to expand this media collection something bigger (e.g. ripping your DVDs for video streaming), you'll quickly find that 2TB isn't enough. You can get an enterprise-grade 16TB hard drive for a reasonable price (about $600 for the drive, plus a USB enclosure), but 16TB of SSD storage would be much more expensive.
I've been using XFCE for quite a while. It is my personal standard desktop these days - when setting up new Linux boxes/VMs, I use the "Xubuntu" distribution, which is Ubuntu with XFCE installed as the default destkop.
I've never liked the heavyweight desktops like Gnome/Unity. I started using Unix systems back when it was a choice between the twm or mwm window managers. The most "advanced" window manager I used for a long time was the "fvwm" window manager, which allowed me a certain amount of customization.
Ordinarily, I would be happy to stick with fvwm, except that it is too stripped-down for a modern Linux installation. More specifically, things like USB storage devices are really awkward, because you need to manually figure out the device name and how to mount their volumes - something modern desktops with file managers do automatically.
XFCE fills that gap beautifully. It discovers and auto-mounts removable media, so I don't have to think about attaching thumb drives and SD cards. But its memory and CPU footprint is still very small.
My only disappointment is that the most recent versions did away with support for Gnome 2 themes. My favorite theme is the old "crux" look, which is not available for the latest XFCE distributions (including the one bundled with Xubuntu 20.04 and later). But that's a minor gripe. On those boxes, I have switched to the "clearlooks-phenix" theme (https://github.com/jpfleury/clearlooks-phenix), which has the old legacy scroll-bar behavior that modern themes don't seem to use anymore.