Freshly installed xubuntu... now, do I go and default to PHPStorm or do I give vim yet another try?

Phpstorm

If you never setup your vim before, then PHPstorm is more productive

Yeah well, phpstorm it is. Those refactoring features are simply unmatched

Vim is a nice editor but not a nice IDE in my opinion. Go with phpstorm

@SHA-16384 Don't have that much ram don't have that issue either. I run quite large projects sometimes in container (phpstorm is nice like that, it can use the interpreter in a container). Might be a specific version problem or perhaps your storage is slow?