I really like the Cinnamon desktop that is on the EPEL repos for CentOS. Nice eye candy but it is a beast to run. I ran system monitor and CPU spiked to 80%.
If you give it enough horsepower it does look great.
But eye candy is not really needed on a server.
Here is the stock image
Not much difference visually but performance wise it is better.
May go even lighter like mate or xfce.
Another thing I finally could continue on was the rebuild of a restore partition.
Unfortunately, I think the physical disk is to far gone for data recover.
Even SMART warns it is going to fail within 24 hours, but I think it has already done that
I think if I had email configured properly on this machine I could have recovered data sooner.
Co worker Carl showed me how to use grammarly to check my publications. Will start doing that with at least free versions, especially for long posts.