This place is constantly shilling Linux, decrying LLMs, and downvoting anything that doesn’t fit the status quo.
Don’t get me wrong I like this place on the whole, but I’ve just come to realise nobody here actually wants to engage with anybody different and just dog piles.
Ubuntu is fine. I do understand the hate, though. Snap is contentious for very good reasons, Canonical makes major decisions by fiat rather than listening to the community (see Snap again), and they have corporate motives that are often at odds with the spirit and desires of the greater FOSS community (like forking upstream projects instead of contributing).
Mint is still based on Ubuntu, for example, but I feel it’s a more ethical suggestion than Ubuntu itself.
It's not on the list, but I've been rocking the same KDE fedora installation through about ten version upgrades. Once you dial in your settings and software choices, it's fairly solid.
The only issue I can recall was some weirdness with steam's dependencies blocking my last version upgrade, but it was easily bypassed.
I started with pop os 5 years ago and haven't found a reason to change. I'm not hugely techy and just wanted something to play games on. Had very few issues overall.
Works great with steam. I went back on my ethics and played wow classic for a while though and battle.net was a little tricky for me to get going. But yeah steam works perfectly.
Pop!_OS is my top recommendation for Windows expats, followed by Mint (Cinnamon Edition), and then Bazzite (KDE Plasma desktop). Bazzite is so, so, so good, but it has some unique features that make it a little more frustrating for Windows power users who are new to Linux. But honestly they are all good. Pick one, and if you aren’t vibing with it, try something else.
Also, keep in mind that “distro” and “desktop environment (DTE)” are two different things. Sometimes a distro has a default DTE and sometimes it gives you a choice. The DTE makes the biggest difference to your experience. There are many different DTEs, but the two biggest are GNOME (MacOS-like and moderately customizable) and KDE Plasma (Windows-like by default, but very customizable).