EndeavourOS as the distro of choice for easy installation and AUR access.
Depending on the DE, if it’s not MATE, I almost always install Caja, Engrampa, and MATE Calculator since they just have the most sane look and UX to them for my use cases.
Waterfox as my browser of choice (reason over Firefox is that it offers tabs below address bar as an option in Preferences rather than mucking about in userChrome.css files that often break on updates)
Vivaldi as a secondary browser for websites that only render right in Chromium
Kitty as my terminal of choice.
Clementine as my music player of choice
yt-dlp for downloading Youtube videos as mp3s
htop over top, also have gotop for a more graphical look