I’ll be real with you, it’s just familiarity. Whenever I’m setting up a new system, I just install Guake and throw my config file at it, so it feels the same as all of my other computers.

I’m sure that Yakuake is great and that all drop-down terminals probably have identical feature sets. However, I’m getting too old and impatient to distro/software hop. I just like my stuff to work and as long as it does, I don’t change it.

Concerning DE compatibility though: I run cinnamon on most of my machines and Guake has worked flawlessly for me for years on Cinnamon and Gnome. I’ve never been a fan of KDE though, so your milage may vary.

It really has nothing to do with the opening animation, in fact, I’m not even sure if Guake has an animation. It’s about having a self contained terminal “window” where all of your terminals live and you can quickly navigate between them. Then you can hide said window just as fast as it arrived and get back to what you were doing. Keep in mind, these drop down terminals are not treated as traditional windows and are always-on-top.

The problem with traditional terminal windows is: let’s say that I have 4 terminals up for different tasks; it causes a little friction to my workflow when I have to deal with which window is which. That friction is just not present with a drop-down. Of course, you can have a traditional terminal emulator that supports tabs and splitting and set a hotkey to bring the one window into focus with an always-on-top flag; at that point though, you’ve just recreated another drop-down.

Once you get used to it, you’ll never go back haha

I always install Guake. It’s a drop-down terminal emulator and it can be heavily configured with hotkeys. I have it pop open/close with one key and I can split the terminal horizontally or vertically as many times as I want with a couple other hotkeys.

It’s so ridiculously efficient (as a developer) that I can’t stand to not have it installed at this point.

I’m honestly confused as to why everyone here is avoiding actually answering your question. Anyway, for most modern file browsers in Linux:

• Type into the address bar: smb://ip-address-or-domain/share-name
• It should ask for login credentials. Enter your login for the server you’re accessing. Click “remember forever” or something like that.
• Once you’re in, right-click the share in the navigation pane to the left and click “create bookmark” or something like that. When doing so, there may also be a checkbox to make it persistent - if so, check it.

Do you want to actually have a rock solid (albeit, boring) computing experience? Mint or Debian (I know you said no Debian but everyone always come back to the big D eventually)

Do you want a neat flavor-of-the month distro that you’ll tinker with for a while and ultimately move on from? Void is pretty cool

Honorable mention: NixOS. It’s different but when it clicks for people, they never use anything else