In 2006 my university used Ubuntu, I thought ‘Wow, this is different!’ Tried it out on my own computer but I was a heavy gamer so windows was the best option (hey, Win7 pretty alright anyway!)
Fast forward to about 2022, I try it again but it’s not getting incorporated well with my program usage in school (as a teacher).
Fast forward to 2024, worked out that Tencent software is on AUR (teacher in Mainland China) and I figure I’m doing another dive. So far, so good. Little itty bitty glitches especially with Libreoffice but I’m getting by without touching Win10.
Fedora is a good bet, it’s really up to date and should simultaneously be stable.
I use endeavouros (Arch) gnome variant because I need a working distribution in Mainland China with an additional emulated deepin application or two (I hate tinkering with wine or bottles). But otherwise I’d be using Fedora.
I like gnome. I’d say KDE second. Fedora workstation does gnome and there’s the kde variant of course.