Help me choose a distro, please! - programming.dev

I’m ditching Windows in favor of Linux on my personal desktop. And so I’m looking for advice on which distro I should start with. #### About Me I use Linux professionally all the time but mostly to build ci/cd pipelines and for software development/operations. I’ve never been a Linux admin nor have I ever chosen the distro I use. I’m generally comfortable using Linux and digging into configs/issues as needed. #### Planned Usage I use this machine for typical home usage: Firefox, a notes app (currently Notesnook), maybe office style tools like word and excel. I also use this for gaming: Steam, Discord, etc. Lastly and least important, I use this for a small amount of dev work: VSCode, various languages, possibly running containers. #### What I’m Looking For I’d like an OS that’s highly configurable but ships with good default settings and requires very little effort to start using. I don’t want it to ship with loads of applications; I want to choose and install all of the higher level tools. Shipping with a configured desktop is perfectly fine but not required. Ideally, I can have all of this while still keeping the maintenance low. I think that means a stable OS, a good package manager, stable/automatic updates, etc. Last bit. Open source is rather important to me. I prefer free and free. Anyone have good suggestions?? #### Edit I’m aware of tools like Distro Chooser [https://distrochooser.de/]. They’ve recommended Arch Linux and Endeavor OS to me so far. But I’m not ready to trust them yet. I’m looking for human input.