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I’ve read several of the other answers and they are all good. I’ll add a few additional thoughts. I worked for many years at Texas Instruments, in their main campus, located right at the border between Dallas and Richardson. Many of my colleagues lived in Richardson or other nearby suburbs. I myself lived in Richardson for a number of years and also have lived in several other nearby suburbs of Dallas.I would recommend that you get yourself a map of the Dallas-Fort Worth area (the kind you get from rental car agencies) as you read what follows.The first thing I would tell you is that the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) Metropolitan area is quite large. Probably 100 miles wide and 60–70 miles from far south to far north. There are very few natural barriers to building, so there are places to live all over the area and reasonable highways to get from one place to another. Plano, one of the larger suburbs, has over 250,000 residents just by itself - larger than many small cities. Richardson is very well situated, just north and northeast of Dallas, but I’ll say more in a later paragraph. I’ve moved to new residences in the area on five occasions, due to various moves to and from the area required by my job, and the most important lesson I learned is that it takes time to find the best place to live. I strongly recommend taking the time, especially if you ever want to buy a house. Each time I’ve purchased a house (3 of the five times I moved to the Dallas area) I spent six months finding the right neighborhood and house. And here’s something you won’t find in a lot of cities. Each time I ended up buying a newly constructed house. It’s not that there weren’t some older houses that would have been good choices, but the DFW area is growing so fast that there are usually a lot of new housing options to choose from. And the new houses tend to have amenities that the older ones lack.The second thing I would tell you is a little history. The short version is this (limiting the discussion to places reasonably close to Richardson): roughly every decade or so the DFW metropolitan area expands by a few miles and the majority of the new houses and apartments and commercial buildings are being built a little further away from downtown Dallas. [With some exceptions.] In the 1960’s the new houses were being built in Richardson and its neighbor Farmers Branch to the West. In the 1970’s and 1980’s it was Plano and Carrollton. In the 1990’s and 2000’s it was Allen and West Plano (Plano did a lot of annexation and grew to be quite large) and also Lewisville and other suburbs to the West. Today, in the 2020’s it is McKinney and Frisco, one step farther north, where the bulk of the new construction is to be found.Here’s a bit more detail. First some background, again focused on Richardson and neighboring suburbs. In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, there was a railroad line going from Dallas to Oklahoma in a generally north northeast direction. Along that railroad line there grew a number of small towns, roughly 7–10 miles apart. Starting in Dallas, you had Richardson, Plano, Allen, Fairview, McKinney, Anna, and others further to the north. Each was originally just a small, whistle stop town mainly there to provide water for the steam engines of that original railroad. McKinney, however, is the county seat of Collin County, the next county north of Dallas County, so it was quite a bit larger than the others and has some very charming older neighborhoods.US highway 75, also known locally as North Central Expressway, follows that line from downtown Dallas all the way to Oklahoma and the former tracks, generally adjacent to the highway to the east, have been used in part to develop a modern, light rail system that flows along with US 75, although at this time it only reaches Plano. Just to the east of the railroad tracks you’ll find Greenville avenue (highway 5), which runs through the downtown areas of all the little towns mentioned and sometimes goes by the name “Plano Road” because at one point the road to Plano from due South and Greenville (which originates near downtown Dallas), merge..Much of the commercial and residential development in the northern and northeastern part of Dallas has followed that US 75 / tracks / Highway 5 - Greenville Avenue path over the years. When I first moved to Dallas in 1970, Richardson was the suburb where many of the people I worked with chose to live. Highway 75 was five or six lanes up to Richardson and then narrowed down to four and eventually two lanes. Richardson has a fine government, a nice little arts district just north of Campbell road, and an excellent school system (although, as some have explained, the school district boundaries are different from the city boundaries). But most of the houses and apartments in Richardson are now quite dated. Most were built in the 1960’s and 1970’s. This is especially true on the southern end of Richardson, adjacent to Dallas. And, to be frank, many of those houses were being marketed back in the 1960’s and 1970’s to newlyweds and other first time home buyers, so many are single story, relatively small, ranch style homes. So too, much of Richardson’s commercial property was developed back in that era, and a lot of it seems rather dated now. Finally, Richardson was designed as a single family housing community, so apartments are not as plentiful as they are in some other areas of the DFW metropolitan area,So you might want to consider housing options in Plano (the next suburb to the north) or other adjacent suburbs such as Carrollton to the West or even Allen (north of Plano). But I wouldn’t recommend Garland (to the East), as it is even older. I should explain that all of the towns mentioned have excellent school districts.Before I talk about Plano, let me say more about Richardson. Richardson now has a lot of enclaves for people of Asian descent, which means it is an excellent place to find Asian restaurants. I’ve attended some excellent classical music recitals in Richardson, and Asian students are often prominent in these performances. I think a lot of these people came to the US after the Vietnam war and they eagerly bought up a lot of the smaller, older houses in Richardson as the prior owners were moving to larger houses in other suburbs. Also, a number of Asian companies moved into Richardson as part of the telecommunications boom in the 1990’s (see next item). The bottom line is that Richardson is now a very diverse and culturally rich town and I know a lot of people who are very happy living there.Another important fact about Richardson is that it was the hub of the Texas telecommunications industry in the later 1980’s and 1990’s. A lot of the commercial property built in that era was built by telecom companies, and their employees tended to live in the newer, northern and Eastern parts of Richardson (the area to the north of Campbell road) as well as Plano and Allen. Many of those companies are still there, but the telecom bust in the late 1990’s calmed things down quite a bit.One final point: Richardson has more bike trails than the other towns mentioned.A toll road called the George Bush toll road separates Richardson from its neighbor to the north - Plano. In fact they built that toll road in the 1980’s and 1990’s on a strip of land that was largely undeveloped because neither Plano nor Richardson was inclined to get too close to its neighbor. Plano was the place where new houses were being built in the 1970’s through the 1990’s. US 75 was widened during this period so that you could get to Plano or Allen or even McKinney a lot more easily. It is the next suburb north of Richardson and it was largely run by very experienced housing developers, so they expanded the town quite a bit, whereas Richardson was sort of hemmed in and most of its expansion came to the East.Plano has a lot more people than Richardson and as a general rule its roads are wider, its houses are newer, there are more apartments, and it has more of a planned atmosphere. However it is not quite as culturally rich as Richardson. But, of course, it is no problem to hop down to Richardson for a cultural event if you are so inclined. In fact, many people go to downtown Dallas for the really first class symphony, opera, drama, and other cultural events. Much of Plano’s growth is in the far north. For example, Toyota moved its US headquarters to a facility in north west Plano. In the early 2000’s I lived in a nice, well run apartment in Plano at the corner of Greenville Avenue and Spring Creek parkway (just a little north of downtown Plano). It changed its name after I moved out, so I don’t know its new name. There are also a lot of new apartments being built in West Plano, but that is somewhat farther away from Richardson.Once you get to Allen, Fairview and McKinney, you start finding a lot of two story houses. The ranch style that was popular in the 1960–1980 period has dwindled in popularity because the houses require larger lots and they tend to be somewhat darker inside.If you live within the Richardson, Plano, Allen, or McKinney school district, you should generally be in pretty good shape. There are also a number of other good districts in the area if you live a little farther away from the Highway 75 / Greenville corridor. My advice: rent in a nice place and spend a few weekends looking around at potential housing neighborhoods. Take your time. There’s a lot to see. And although a lot of the neighborhoods seem to be boring, with mcmansions on small lots, there are many quite charming neibhborhoods hidden away here and there.