Free and Open Source Software

Personally I am excited for immutable distributions, so my suggestion would be Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite. It may be a spin of Fedora, but it works completely differently than regular Fedora. I am using it as my daily driver since over a year and I am quite happy with it (apart from reoccuring breakages caused by kernel updates, e. g. my AMD desktop currently does not work with kernel 6.4 or newer, but this doesn't have anything to do with Silverblue).

There are other immutable distributions out there, e. g. Vanilla OS or openSUSE microOS, so if you really want to avoid Fedora, you could also choose trying out one of these. In the case of Vanilla OS I would wait until version 2 is out, because version 2 will be radically different from the first release.

I use mint on my PC , for its stability , and since all ubuntu software are supported , it is pretty great software selection wise too !

OpenBSD

Linux is UNIX made by people who hate Windows.

FreeBSD is UNIX made by people who love UNIX.

Give FreeBSD a shot.

Try Haiku, it's the current open source version of BeOs (currently on it's 4th Beta release) and it runs on x86 hardware.

Or what about just using a bare bones Linux as a wrapper for an emulator? Then you could try running something like Workbench 3.9 or MacOS 9, which makes browsing the web an interesting experience ... plus, cute icons :-)

If you're looking for something to keep it as libre as possible, then Debian is a great choice. I know Fedora by default keeps it that way, though you can install non-free software/codecs/etc if you want. Debian is the same way. And since Debian is the foundation of some of the biggest distros out there, you're pretty much always going to find packages for what you need. And if you go with Debian Testing or Unstable, you can get a bit more recent packages, and I've never found them to be really "unstable." Wouldn't run them on a server, but a desktop is totally fine.

I do like some of the suggestions here for FreeBSD or OpenBSD. If you were to go that route, I'd go with FreeBSD. Their documentation is stellar (though OpenBSD's is as well), the man pages are fantastic and actually helpful, and between the ports and packages repos, you'll generally find what you need. Plus things like ZFS, jails, etc. are great.

Go with your instincts on trying Haiku and come back and tell us all what it's like :)

I think something like alpine or void with a wayland based tiling window manager could be fun.

If you're looking to try something a little different, I recommend Guix.

It's based around a nyx-style package manager written in scheme, which is also called guix. There's an EDSL for writing package definitions. One interesting result about this is that the package manager has a REPL and a dedicated emacs mode

Instead of systemd, the PID1 process is called GNU Shepherd, and is also written in scheme.

Guix also has a strong emphasis on bootstrapping. You can build almost the entire system from source, relying on only a few binaries to start with.

Xubuntu. Ubuntu because most of the time, I just want a plug and play experience with a huge community. And XFCE because it's lightweight and has all the tiling features I like.

I really enjoyed tinkering Arch, I learned a lot of stuff, but it's too much effort for my usual laziness.

Did you check the opensuse community repos? Search here: https://software.opensuse.org/ - lots of stuff that isn't included in the core / official.

@agrammatic
I really love to test FreeBSD. But I have been advised not to do this. Because #FreeBSD hardware support is not as good as #Linux.
Please tel us more about your experience with FreeBSD.

For true freedom and to challenge yourself, try OpenBSD. For something easier, try GhistBSD since it comes with a GUI desktop.

Plain debian testing with the desktop of your choice (I like xfce). Rolling release, slightly newer packages than ubuntu, very stable and reliable, as minimalist and light weight as you want (depends on installation method).

MX23 would work great on this