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’ve had Fedora on several computers, and everything worked for quite a while while. Eventually though, things just began to break randomly - probably a sign of me not doing much maintenance.
The most common issue was Gnome Software center failing to update anything. I just ignored that app, and continued to upgrade through the CLI for a while. Eventually, I just got tired of that, and installed Debian on my HTPC.
Now I can finally treat that computer the way I want. Just install, watch videos, update when needed, and ignore the rest. I have another computer for satisfying my tinkering desires, so this one is just for the videos and very light browsing, but not much else. Therefore, Debian is the perfect distro for this kind of use.
I have had lots of issues with the Software Center in the past as well. I just blamed it on Gnome and used the CLI anyway, as I'm more comfortable seeing what exactly happens in case it goes wrong. But it seems it has been fixed now because it's been month (maybe even a year or two, I couldn't say) that I've not had to complain.
(But yeah, to each their own, in the end it's not really important)