TDE. Functional, stays out of my way, but still reasonably full-featured. The development team is dedicated to adding useful features while keeping the original look and feel, so I don’t have to go hunting for settings that have inexplicably moved or changed defaults every time I update. It doesn’t support Wayland, but I’m Wayland-neutral (that is, I have nothing against it, but I have nothing against X either).

Yet another, “well, yeah, technically it has security ramifications, but I’m not admin’ing any multiuser machines, so I’m not losing any sleep over it” bug.

Gentoo supports either configuration, as it does with a lot of things. My systems were installed with split /usr and I have no intention of changing that, because the merge adds no value for me.

Um, if your primary use is typing accented letters, why don’t you just set a compose key? The character sequences you need to type are much more intuitive, and you don’t get this type of problem.

In my case, I have scroll lock (the most useless key on the keyboard) set as a compose key. To get “é”, I type scroll lock, then e, then '.

You can set a compose key using setxkbmap, for instance setxkbmap -option compose:sclk. (If scroll lock isn’t to your liking, there are a number of other modifier keys that can be used instead—list here, starting around line 810.) You can also specify it permanently using X configuration files, although I don’t know the exact method.

The GPU doesn’t care about the CPU, or vice-versa. AMD is probably better value for money right now if you’re intending to replace both CPU and mobo, but Intel will work.

The reason you don’t see AMD CPU + nVidia GPU in premade machines these days has to do with corporate contracts, not interoperability. Before AMD bought out ATI, it wasn’t an uncommon combination.