Pingu was actually a great show tbh

That's horrifying. In a good way.

I'd say VSCodium, Kate or Vim. VSCodium if you want something like VSCode, Kate for just an absolutely amazing IDE or Vim if you want to try something new.

Fedora KDE. It's easy to setup, modern, customizable and fast. Second would be Mint, it's only flaws is that it ships an older kernel (might be a pain) and uses X11 (insecure).

I'm using rofi-wayland.

I second this. uBlue is amazing if you want something that just works and doesn't break.

The menu is rofi-wayland. The customization is just one of these with slightly tweaked colors (I'm too lazy to do it myself lol)

just works

After compiling and configuring for a few hours sure

Thank you! (-:

That's very true. However even still I don't think beginners should use distros which are unstable until they learn Linux a bit more.

I agree. Whenever I use Arch or Arch-based distros they are always very unstable. That is fine if you like a learning curve, but if you don't (like OP) then they probably aren't for you.

I'd say Fedora KDE. It just works, the docs are good, it has a big community and large enough repos.