@daniel.m.tripp Are you running an SSD or HDD? Reason I ask is because that can and does play a huge factor in how quickly apps load, even simple ones like calculator.
I’m not familiar with straight Debian, but I am with Mint and Manjaro. Recently I switched back to Manjaro after seeing the significant improvements they’ve made in the last 6-12 months in regards to their package manager. I love the fact that I can search and choose which app package to install, from AUR, official repos, or snaps, all consolidated within the one package manager. You can even search and build from Git with 1 or 2 clicks. As someone who’s not overly savvy with the CLI, this saves me a lot of time and hassle. That being said, the Pacman CLI commands are fairly easy to learn. Running sudo pacman -Syyu in Arch/Manjaro is the same as running sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade in Ubuntu, for example.
Anyways, not sure if this is helpful at all for you, but I’ve found Manjaro to be one of the best distros for out-of-the-box hardware detection and compatibility. Might be worth giving it a try? 