I also don't consider myself a distrohopper (I've only installed Ubuntu based distros), but I did recently install Ubuntu and KDE Neon on separate computers.
It really depends on what I'm using the computer for, but I'll list my most commonly used applications by importance tiers:
A Tier (cannot live without these):
- Firefox
- Neofetch (obviously)
- A GUI file manager (doesn't really matter which one)
- A usable Desktop Environment
B Tier (extremely useful but nonessential):
- LibreOffice
- Xournal++ (for taking notes, and editing PDFs)
- Baobab (for recording disk usage)
- Steam
- VLC (video player)
- Clementine (music player)
- htop (CLI system monitor)
- GUI "appstore"
C Tier (very useful, but quite niche):
- VSCode
- Vivaldi
- Retroarch
- Krita
- Kdenlive
- OBS Studio
- Wine
- GUI system monitor
- Standalone PDF viewer