So after spending another hour and a half banging my head against the wall trying to set up a static DNS address I decided I was not happy with it all. Initially I wanted to wait for new hardware in a few months but I felt like life is too short for that drama, so I downloaded MXLinux and installed it.
The attraction here was no systemd by default, Xfce desktop and, since its based on Debian Stretch, the familiar old apt system and synaptic as the system package manager on top of that. The possible drawbacks were that my VPN client relies on systemd so perhaps I'd have problems there, the fact that Debian stable has some really old software that can cause dependency issues for some newer programs and my memory of having freezing issues a year or so back with MX 16 or 17 but admittedly that was in a VM and Virtualbox can get buggy sometimes. Anyway onto the results.
Installation time: 15 minutes max and I'd saved full cut/paste of profiles like Waterfox and mail and most other configs in my home folder so setup after that was rather quick as well with a few copy/pastes. Overwrote my Xubuntu install on a dual boot and initially I was a bit worried about Windows not showing up in the grub menu but after running update-grub it was there.
Networking: Opened Network Manager and set the DNS addresses I wanted in the simple GUI and did some tests. Worked first time no issues and no DNS leaks.
VPN client: Yep it didn't run. Looked up some info on this and it's fairly simple to change out the sytemd managed service to run on the old init system but after looking at the changlogs of the clients I just used the old one from last year that ran on SysVinit. All the same settings are there including a killswitch and ipv6 blocker and the rest is just fluff. Worst case scenario is I use OpenVPN or do it all manually.
Software: I had some trouble here but what I found is MXLinux makes it easy for you to get stuff from the backports repo and there quite a bit in there from Sid that has been ported back. I use streamlink to watch Twitch sometimes and that gave me the most trouble as the GUI requires a newer version and it wouldn't recognise the backported version. I just built this from source and for some reason had to use python 2.7 instead of 3.5 to run it(?). Not sure why but it works now.
Screen tearing: I've had this issue with every Xfce install I've ever used and MX has a wonderful Compton tool(and many other awesome tools) with a config editor built in so fixing this was easy .
Nvidia Driver: I don't like using this usually but Nouveau is shit, so I installed it. Got bios errors because their driver doesn't initiate early enough, but its fine. Maybe my bios is getting too old as well(2012).
Possible Best Feature: I haven't really looked into this or tried it but the Anti-X Live USB tool seems like it is awesome. It promises to make a a bootable Live USB of your system so theoretically you can setup everuything to your liking and this tool will make a snapshot that you can use anywhere with all your settings intact. We'll see.
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