My go to back in The Day was just Ubuntu because I was lazy. We're talking the 14.04/16.04 days. Ubuntu was simple and mostly just worked. I now find myself needing to de-spywareify as the coming administration is likely to force Microsoft into tracking "dissidents" so need to get back into weaning myself off the Windows teat.
I recently dualbooted my main desktop with Ubuntu 24.04 and have been... entirely underwhelmed. The whole separation between APT and snap packages doesn't work well together and is really the big problem I have, as a lot of standard deb packages just refuse to install properly now. the UI is hard to use and doesn't make me happy, and it's not been playing nice with my Zen 4 desktop when it comes to ACPI power states (no sleep, doesn't reliably turn the power off when i ask it to turn off, etc). So overall, I am just not terribly interested in using Ubuntu anymore.
What I primarily want is the sort of "mostly just works" like old 16.04 but still gave you the full ability to monkey under the hood- and is also something based on a normal distro that most people write guides for because I am a smoothbrain. Should I just head to using basic plain jane Debian or something?
I recommend Arch and KDE. The community to docs are really good. It's a rolling release distro, so always up to date.
https://youtu.be/FxeriGuJKTM?feature=shared
I hate being the, "I use Arch" guy, but it's really been a great experience for me with KDE. Minimal issues after a complicated first time setup, but it's absolutely been worth it. For anyone that's pretty decent with computers already, and can understand the documentation, I would recommend trying it out. I just converted a laptop the other day to Arch and used archinstall for the first time. It did pretty well other than a couple of small tweaks that most users would never know about in fstab relating to SSDs and LUKS encryption.
There's a steep learning curve, but it's made me learn a lot about the Linux operating system and a lot about computers in general.
Pretty much the same experience with me. Also, once I heard that The Streamdeck uses Arch and KDE, I was willing to give it a try. Flatpaks are pretty nice too.
I'm really excited about the budding relationship between Steam and Arch. The Steamdeck has already been invaluable in adoption and progression, and now their serious. The future appears bright here.