help me choose a configuration

I'd like some input and overview from those who know the state of GNU/Linux better than me.

This is a long explanation, but I think it is probably needed if I am to get genuinely useful advice.

As my username suggests, I am a long time Mac user (since 1988). Whilst I've always supported free software principles in principle, I have never found a free or even mostly free system that works for what I do. This may be partly because I am a musician and need good specialised software for that. (and no the free software definitely isn't there yet, although it has reached an exciting stage of being usable for some tasks or some users)

Realistically I won't be entirely stopping using my Macs in the next couple of years, but as Apple's attitude towards their users has become steadily more unacceptable over the last decade my motivation to find alternatives has increased. Previous attempts have always been thwarted by brokenness and unusabilty. It really doesn't matter how "free" it is, if it doesn't work with an acceptable level of maintenance.

My current strategy is to turn my OSX machines into offline music / graphics workstations, (and turn off many of apple's spyware processes) and move all my normal computer things that everyone does like email and browsing onto a free (or at least free-er) system.

Once I have my daily communications on a GNU/linux system I like, I will look more into how far it can replace osx for music too.

I am not absolutely limiting myself to entirely free systems as Trisquel does. Just getting off osx at all will be a huge improvement, and I won't risk that for absolute purity - nevertheless I'd prefer to avoid any system that is even hinting at the sort of user manipulation practised by apple, and that's why I'm looking here first.

Here's my wish list:

- Stable and responsive. Freezes, and any sort of gui unresponsiveness drives me nuts really fast.

- simple but powerful traditional desktop with good system monitors and control over the machine. I'm considering MATE and Gnome fallback, and maybe XFCE. lxde is too limited, and unity and all the other shiny design disasters are just stupid, if I wanted that i'd stay with apple.

- Decent repos with a known set of tools that work together.

- GUI tools that work. I'm not averse to the terminal, but I'm not maintaining computers all day every day and I will forget the commands and have to look them up and a GUI is faster, but only if it works, if it fails and I have to look it up anyway and then fix the GUI as well then i'll be forced back to osx.

- good file manager that allows me to find and copy system files from the GUI.

- control over network traffic and application /processes, from a GUI, with visual feedback. A per app firewall.

On OSX we have little snitch, TCP block, handsoff, launchcontrol- GUI apps that are far from perfect and mostly not free but give me quite a bit of control over the security of the machine. I'm looking for software that does this stuff in a way I can control without spending weeks learning the details of configuration file syntax for commandline programs that turn out not to do what I thought anyway. I know that apparmour and other processes do some of this stuff, but haven't yet found a fast way of configuring it with feedback as I go.

So far I have tried Mint/MATE, Trisquel mini, Trisquel standard (briefly), lubuntu, xubuntu (and others in the past). I've also tried adding MATE and XFCE to my Trisquel mini install but haven't got them working very well yet.

So specific questions:

* MATE or Gnome Fallback/Flashback? Why? Can XFCE compete? where does it fall short?

* Are there any issues with MATE on Trisquel? is it hard to optimise? so far there seems to be a problem with the applet that shows network connections, which is rather important!

* How different is Mint/MATE to Trisquel with MATE instead of Gnome? (unfree kernel, impure approach to repos, sure, what else?)

* I really feel that a user should be able to administer the system mostly from GUI based tools, starting with the file manager. I would however rather use the terminal than some tacked on GUI that has few options, no feedback, and fails silently the moment anything is a tiny bit unexpected, and that has been most of my experience with GNU guis so far...so I'd appreciate any guidance on where the gui tools work well, and where I should just bite the bullet and make up a file of relevant terminal commands for future reference.

I think that's more than enough for now... my further ideas and questions are separate enough to be in a different topic .

thanks for reading this far!