Have you perused Distro Watch?

Lots of good info & news, and info on just about every distro there is, stuff you've never heard of. Years and years ago this was my introduction to FreeNAS that made a huge difference in my life. You should check it out if you haven't already.

So you have a lot of suggestions in this thread.

I have an unconventional one:

Red hat.

You can use it for free as long as you register on their website.

The benefit: lots of documentation, a significantly different way of thinking about things (it asks you to define a compliance posture out of the box lol) and a package manager that does a lot of things right.

You said yourself youve been in the game for a while. Why not try being agent smith instead of neo?

I run ubuntu's server base headless install with a self-curated minimal set of gui packages on top of that (X11, awesome, pulse, thunar) but there's no reason you couldn't install kde with wayland. Building the system yourself gets you really far in the anti-bloatware dept, and the breadth of wiki/google/gpt based around Debian/Ubuntu means you can figure just about any issues out. I do this on a ~$200 eBay random old Dell + a 3050 6gb (slot power only).

For lighter gaming I'll use the Ubuntu PC directly, but for anything heavier I have a win11 PC in the basement that has no other task than to pipe steam over sunshine/moonlight

It is the best of both worlds.

I haven't seen many mentions of Nobara but you can try it out.

It's essentially a gaming-centric version of Fedora. I was in your position a few weeks back and decided upon thing. Latest drivers and packages.

I just installed NixOS and the repeatability of it is pretty neat. I like the idea of having one file that sets up 90% of any pc going forward. Not sure how often I'll use it, but feels neat.

Check out Garuda Linux. Comes with a preset catalog of gamer related nonsense on KDE - or - they offer a minimal KDE version as well if you'd rather set things up your way.

I started with the preset one and then switched my machines over to the barebones one once I had a handle on Linux. It's been a smooth ride. Things only break when I break them touching things unnecessarily out of curiosity because I don't know what I'm doing.

Garuda is arch btw

If you are an expert, why are you asking pee ons like us?

I've bounced around alot, have numerous distributions on my Proxmox Hypervisor, but my favorite daily driver, for a really old computer, is ( MX Linux ) I've twice tried other distros to see if I could improve upon the stability and performance, as well as the very convenient availability of a feature rich KDE Desktop environment, and I came back to MX twice now. When I get a new fast computer, I'll switch to Qubes OS, for it's built-in hypervisor and security/privacy and isolation features, but until then, I'll stick with MX.

IMHO, there are excellent reasons why MX ranks highest. I think it's original roots in AntiX with the elimination of systemd has afforded it a substantial advantage over stock-standard Debian, my last daily driver which always had performance issues. With MX, on same hardware, system lock ups are far less frequent when the system is overtaxed.