The OS itself, Debian. If I have to pick a component, Mate Panel. Compared to the Windows 11 start menu, it’s useful, customizableand has no ads. My IT department at work can’t even figure out how to remove the Windows 11 start menu ads from my computer.
There are things I miss from Windows 95, 98, NT, and XP. There’s nothing I miss from Windows 7, 10, or 11. Everything I cared about had been deleted by the time of Windows 7.
Yeah, try pressing Alt+[PrintScreen, F] to invoke the OOM killer. It kills the memory-hoggingest process, usually the web browser.
Fedora documentation says this sysrq functionality may be disabled by default. You can enable it once by typing at a terminal: echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq or permanently with echo 'kernel.sysrq = 1' | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/90-sysrq.conf
If it turns out that memory overconsumption is the problem, you can sometimes fix this lag by disabling swap. 16GB is easily enough RAM to do all normal desktop things.
My gaming PC dual boots Debian and Ubuntu