If this is in the wrong community let me know, but I have been away from linux for a little while now, and I have decided to come back to it. I am trying to figure out what Distro and Desktop environment I should use.
I used to use Ubuntu and, Ubuntu based Distributions, though for various reasons I had bad experiences with the ones based down stream of Ubuntu, I have also heard that Ubuntu is no longer nearly as good as they where before. As for desktop Experences, I never really liked Gnome. That being said from what I can tell there has been quite a bit that has changed sense I left, and any recommendations would be much appreciated.
I ordered a new laptop (Thinkpad E15 [intel]), this is going to be my primary device.
I can recommend Debian because I have used it. It would be a solid base and personally I like to offload complex stuff to containers and VMs. Might consider Funtoo or NixOS but I haven’t used them yet personally. I’m typing on arch rn, I don’t think it’s quite as stable as debian unless you really want the AUR, still useful on certain constrained/edge environments.
Garuda could be cool but a bit experimental last time we used it.