Linux

I highly recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed (or Slowroll). It is a rock-solid rolling-release where most things can be done from the YaST GUI. The installer is very granular, you can pick and choose based on groups of programs (like internet, office, desktop environment, etc) or individual packages (in advanced mode).

It has never broke on me and I have used it on and off for several years now. I like to tinker so I often do reinstalls of other distros when I break them but never needed to with Tumbleweed.

It is modern but not unfamiliar, rolling but not unstable, granular but not overwhelming (imho).

If rolling-release isn't your thing there is also openSUSE Slowroll which does updates monthly (apart from security updates which are back ported)

Even if you don't pick Tumbleweed, there are plenty of good options. Rapid fire I'll recommend some others.

• Fedora Workstation: my next favorite distros for many of the same reasons as Tumbleweed, semi-rolling and major updates every 6 months, but no YaST or granular installer. It uses GNOME desktop environment.

• Fedora Atomic: pretty much Fedora Workstation but more stable because the root filesystem is read-only and updates are pushed as an OCI image. You can still install anything supported by Fedora.

• Universal Blue: Modified versions of Fedora Atomic which aim to be much more user-friendly and preconfigured out of the box. I recommend them over Fedora Atomic vanilla images. Bazzite is my recommendation for any gamer on Linux (though most distros work).

If you want to have a good experience on Linux, avoid perpetually out of date distros like Debian/Ubuntu and their derivatives. Linux game support is always improving, same thing with basically everything, so dont kneecap yourself with slow/stable release distros.

+1 for mint. I've been using pop, zorin and manjaro, but since I've used mint I completely switched to daily driving it on my personal devices and my gaming PC, even going so far that I got it installed on the company laptop 👍

They're all basically the same dude. They're all GNU/Linux. You have 2 main distros: Debian and Arch. Fedora is a kind of inbetween, there's SUSE as well, but mostly it's all Debian and Arch.

Mint, Ubuntu, etc ... it's all just Debian. Use Debian.You can use KDE plasma or Gnome or i3 or whatever you want.

Debian's pretty good, or if you need something a bit newer, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed seems pretty good as well in terms of a beginner's distro.

Wayland is the future, and the present. I wouldn't shy away from it. I've been using it for years with multi-monitor and multi-gpu, it beats the hell out of having to dink with X11 about once a week to keep my screens in the right place.

And with X11 pretty much on life support, it's time. And Mint isn't the distro to do that on.

Ubuntu doesn't push flatpaks, they push Snaps. But Ubuntu has a ton of other issues, so YMMV. It might be the one for you, who knows.

Mint is a great first choice, and you should be able to do lots with it, but there's others you might want to at least be aware of, if gaming is important.

If you don't care about customization at all, Bazzite (Fedora). While you can update typical things like panels, icon styles, window decorations, etc., making changes to things like SDDM requires a little bit more creativity.

That's because it's atomic (mostly immutable). You don't have to worry about a bad update breaking your system, since you can just rpm-ostree rollbackand get back to it. The downside is that atomic distros have a different way they're designed, so learning how to work with them has a little bit of a learning curve, but it's worth learning, imo.

CachyOS (Arch). Kinda the hot thing right now. It's Arch but oriented towards gaming, content creation, and optimized computing. You'll have full customization abilities like a traditional distro, access to the AUR, and some really nice kernel and scheduler tweaking tools.

Pop!_OS Cosmic (Ubuntu). Pop!_OS has been a longtime popular choice, but they're currently throwing all their effort into their brand new Cosmic desktop environment, so I'd wait until everything is at least in Beta. It looks great, though, and I think it's going to set some new standards for user experiences.

I settled on Manjaro over the past year but since arch isn’t in consideration, I’d vote fedora or a derivative like bazzite due to its additions for gaming.

I was about to say that you should learn the "ins and outs" of Linux first before choosing a distro until I've noticed these part(s) of your post.

I’ve been toying with Linux on and off for almost 20 years now.

I’m comfortable in the command line

20 years is more than enough time for a user to use Linux properly. And with that in mind, well... you are overthinking it -- just go with whatever you want, really.

Similar story here. Tried some latest versions of popular distros. Settled with Fedora KDE. Fedora supported nearly everything in my convertible laptop out of the box where others were hit and miss. Easy transition from Windows 10. KDE doesn't enforce it's own opinions of desktop and workflow like Gnome does. Steam, Epic and GoG all play fine. It's my daily driver now. Much recommended.

Mints fine, but if you are looking for stability, gaming, and you don’t care too much for customization, I’d recommend Bazzite.

Bazzite has all gaming tweaks built in already (including device drivers) so things just work, you never have to use the command line unless you want to (I just had a BIOS update from the KDE Discover store where I get all my updates from).

I’ve always ran Ubuntu of some flavour in the past but would run into things eventually breaking or not working well. Coming up on the 2 year mark for Bazzite on my laptop.