Linux desktop enviroments suck anyways. Poor man's Windows/MacOS that put looking "just like the real thing!!1" above everything. Get a nice window manager and brew something up yourself. Bigger investment upfront but it pays off, IMO. You don't need to touch it for years, or really ever, once you've set it up. There's a lot of WMs out there that are basically feature complete and don't see this constant cacaphony of updates that keep reinventing the wheel and shuffling everything around so the maintainer gets to keep his corpo job. Also less nasty surprises because you know all the warts already. The biggest difference between DEs and WMs in my experience is that the people who work on WMs actually use Linux and their own product. You'll often catch many a DE developer talking about his Macbook. He does not run Linux on it.
KDE 3 and Gnome 2 were unceremoniously chucked in the trash for no reason.
All of the new designs that came after KDE 3 and GNOME 2 are bullshit. To be honest I've never been a big fan of either, but I can appreciate both of them. I tried TDE a while back. It was surprisingly slow to load and it had weird issues like sizing the system windows too short so you have to scroll for things that you shouldn't have to. Not sure what the fuck was going on there.
I used GNOME 2 extensively in my early days of Linux. It was the hot shit coupled with Compiz-Fusion. Way better than Aero Glass. I'm aware of MATE and I've used that a bit too, but I'm more of a "Classic Windows" kinda guy.
More recently, I used to use IceWM which worked okay but it had some issue where it would cause drop down menus on websites to stop working randomly. I put up with that for a few years. I'm on Xfce now and it works okay too, but I'm pretty pissed off about them trying to force GNOME-style buttons on the titlebar bullshit before reverting it in the next release after their userbase bitched them out.
Freak out how exactly? X by itself shouldn't really do anything when you plug in a monitor. That sounds more like the hotplug manager *cough*systemd's udev*cough* or (less likely, but always an option) the kernel's gpu drivers having a problem or the DE trying to do automagic windows-like things and failing spectacularily.
There's e.g. a really, really, really, really, really longstanding issue with (at least) intels gpu kernel drivers handling monitor EDIDs poorly and not always offering all supported resolutions and refresh rates as a result. (and also REFUSING custom ones) I had to edit and custom load on boot my Thinkpad's panel's EDID in order to get 50 Hz out of it. (important if you wanna emulate PAL games and have smooth scrolling) The kernel then proceeded to helpfully notify me that I am, indeed, loading a custom edid every time the monitor woke up from sleep, spamming me to death with messages. I ended up having to comment out the code that did that in the kernel source.
So, my new laptop (Lenovo P16 with Alder Lake 16c/24t and no discrete GPU) and running Arch Linux with Xorg and Xfce, has a 4k display, actually 3840x2400, which I was running at native resolution with a 2x scale (0.5x scale per the assbackwards Xfce display settings) for an effective resolution of 1920x1200. This worked okay, other than the fact that it was slightly blurry despite being an integer scale.
My LG 4k OLED TV, with HDR turned on, correctly reports itself as a 4k60 display. I also run this at native resolution and 2x scale, for an effective resolution of 1920x1080. When I hotplug this display, one of a few things happens. It switches over to that display only and turns off the laptop display, or it connects as my secondary display but changes the scale of my laptop display to 1x, or one of them starts flickering. Sometimes when I try to change the settings to what they should be on one display, the other changes to the wrong settings. Saying fuck 4k and running them both at non-native resolutions of 1920x1200 and 1920x1080 does not solve the problem. I even have a profile set up to apply settings when this combination of displays are detected and even that doesn't always work. There is also the issue of the rightmost two (scale) or four (native) pixel columns of the laptop display showing on the left edge of the TV's picture.
I also have KDE/Wayland installed, on the same hardware, same Arch Linux install. Under Wayland I have none of these issues, scaling works flawlessly, hotplug works flawlessly, I can set the settings once and they actually stick, and the picture quality at native resolution with 2x scale is identical to running 1920x1200 and 1920x1080 and letting the displays scale the images. Also, I can change the settings to whatever and things continue to work as expected.
