Distro suggestions?

Why not Debian? It’s a fantastic distro on its own, without the need to bolt on vendor’s stuff if you already know what you’re doing.

Debian just released version 12 and it regularly gets high marks for being a good, solid distro – if you want a little more edge, you can switch over to Debian Sid …

Fedora. I'd avoid Ubuntu and its derivatives like Pop! or Arch derivatives. I think Arch is fine, especially if you know what you're doing, but Arch derivatives in my experience are much less stable than for example Ubuntu or Fedora.

But seriously. Fedora. It's the best. Ubuntu is actually fine too but Blue > Orange

Mint Cinnamon

Debian.

Linux mint if you are new.

ZorinOS if your mom will use your PC.

Arch linux if you are sane.

Gentoo if you are insane.

Ubloatu, Fedora, Slackware and friends if you want to be a "different" user.

Personally love PopOS! It's super easy and convient, has a super smart window tiling manager worth trying out!

Hear me out, grab ventoy, a decent USB drive (32-64 gb), download debian, kubuntu (maybe), fedora/mojara, any live arch derivative (endeavour, arco, artix. Stay away of Manjaro) and anything else you found appealing. Put all of them there and go nuts. At the end of the day, it's always night.

You could do straight Debian or anything else Debian-based like Mint Debian Edition or MX.

Otherwise Fedora is very recommended for general purpose desktop Linux. But, that isn't Debian.

I don't know if Kali is really recommended for general purpose.

I'm interested in seeing the other recommendations here, it is always fun to see what other users recommend or use. I use Alpine but it isn't always perfect as a desktop for people who don't like things breaking.

You should try Pop! OS. It's pretty much Ubuntu without the weird snap garbage, so has a direct Debian heritage.

Since you're more familiar with Debian, I recommend Linux Mint. Ubuntu if you don't care about snap. These are generally good and pretty friendly. If you know your way around Linux and want something else that also has up-to-date stuff (Debian is always a little behind on updates) and you don't mind reading on some documentation to get started, you could also try Fedora. Kali Linux tools are available to most distributions.

your computer can pretty much run every single distribution in any desktop environment without a problem so go wild and try lots of them, pick anything a let yourself have a good week with it and it's online documentation to do your thing every of them have good and bad parts. when asked the filesystem pick btrfs and set-up snapshots, that will save your ass when needed and it's so quick you could break your system every week without being bothered

Fedora is just flat-out king for desktop IMO. It has packages that are new, but not unstable. Lots of Red Hat engineers use it as a daily driver, so fixes come quick, and it has a pretty large user base. It's made for this stuff.

Thanks for all the suggestions. Think I'm currently leaning towards Debian 12 for now, and depending on how that feels might try mint next.

I suggest you to try Void.

I had Linux Mint several years, it's a great Distro on Debian/Ubuntu. But, as a heavy gamer, I needed fresh and up-to-date sources for Mesa and the Kernel and so I switched to EndeavourOS, which is Arch-based and I can highly recommend it! It's rock solid and gaming is great.

I'm a fan of Manjaro

Pop!_OS, Debian, and Fedora are my distros of choice lately. Been tempted to try out NixOS as well.

Linux Mint and then don't worry about it. It just works.

Fedora 38 is great. Debian 12 is also good if you prefer apt. But with Fedora just use dnf instead of apt and its basically exactly the same.

Classic arch Linux is the way to go imo. If you need something a little more turn key, I would go with linux mint Debian edition! Debian was the first distro I ever used, an I think if you feel at home there, linux mint Debian edition might be what you’re looking for.

Based on your needs any distro is probably fine. They're pretty much all free, i don't think you'll find a better answer from internet randos than just booting from live usb and trying them out. I use arch btw.

I'd try Debian or if you're feeling adventurous, EndeavourOS.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a great choice for a robust rolling distribution. Automated testing of packages rules out most of regressions and its KDE implementation is top notch. If you were considering Fedora or Arch, look no further.

I'm not linux expert. But I have been messing around with it again lately, trying to get it working on my gaming laptop. I was using Nobara for a bit, which I liked quite a bit. It's a Fedora-based distro that's put together by the GloriousEggroll guys so it comes with Nvidia drivers and tons of gaming stuff preinstalled.

I ended up ditching it mainly for one reason: it didn't handle my hybrid graphics well. Some games worked fine, some refused to even start.

I ended up swapping to Pop!_OS because it supports hybrid Nvidia graphics with no issues. The guys who make the distro sell laptops with hybrid graphics so they have incentive to have it work well. All the games that wouldn't start in Nobara work seamlessly in Pop.

I'm not a huge fan of the desktop environment but I'm getting used to it and there's definitely something to be said for everything just working.

I was hesitant for the last few years to recommend Solus. They stopped communicating with the community and there hadn't been a new iso in a while. Software was still being updated behind the scenes but it seemed like it was dying. Now 4.4 was released a few weeks ago with short term and long term plans announced so I feel good recommending trying it. The only issue is it's software repository isn't as big as other distros. But I switched to Debian and have been happy with that. Probably the way to go if you are familiar with it from using Kali.

I'd go with MX Linux for sure, this is a very nice distro, w/o systemd, based on Debian, and using Xfce so it's pretty fast