Linux

This is gonna be super far fetch, but hear me out.... Debian....

Just about any major distro.

There's so many distro's to choose from that can all be productive.

If the question is this short, my answer is too: Go try at least 10 and then come back to tell us what you liked and what not.

Without any further information it's like going into a forest and asking people to point out a tree. Unless you look for some specific tree all will do...

Edit: Fat fingers

Linux mint Debian edition or Opensuse tumbleweed.

Slow Internet/less updates, older, more tested software, slightly wider package availability: LMDE.

Faster Internet, more updates, very new (but well tested) software, needs slightly more technical knowledge sometimes: Opensuse tumbleweed.

I personally use Opensuse Slowroll, which is a slower rolling release experimental version of Opensuse tumbleweed.

Throw a dart and use whatever it lands on. If you don’t have any actual requirements, they’re all pretty okay.

+1 for debian.
No need to mess around with debian derivatives for whatever pointless extra widgets they have.
It's good enough for most stuff and has "allow nonfree drivers" choice which helps with annoying hardware problems of the past.

If you don't care about desktop env, you probably don't care about wayland vs xorg either.
So I'd try XFCE, simple, basic, lightweight, fast, probably not the most modern or flashy,
but you're getting to work faster.

Pretty much any distribution would meet that criteria.

Is just pick one and get going. If you run into problems, you'll now have more specific selection criteria and can make a more discerning choice of another distribution.

Given your initial "maybe Debian" just grab Debian stable and see where it takes you.

Check out MX (Debian + extra tools to make desktop use easier)

Depending on what you need for productivity, you'll most likely be fine with just using flatpak to install any fresh packages.

I'm a long time Mint user. My Mint laptop is my daily drive and it served me well even with my not IT related job during the pandemic home office days.

And it's a 2nd gen i5 with 8 gb memory, it handled like a champ for 3d mechanical design.

You can use almost any distribution for productivity. First, what type of productivity are we speaking off? Secondly your hardware. Do you need the newest of the newest or are you one who want to stay at the same known version of operating system for as long as possible?

Fedora is pretty good if you want a more up to date experience. Fedora Silverblue if you want fast atomic updates and just want to run flatpaks (or use a toolbox/distrobox for traditional packages or even overlay them completely). Otherwise Ubuntu has always felt like a very complete experience, just don't get crypto wallets from the snap store.

Try Distrochooser: https://distrochooser.de/en/

Just to see what it gives to you and think and discuss about the suggestions.

Linux Mint EDGE

I disagree with Debian because it has old packages and you will constantly have issues that are already fixed in the new versions. Specially if you run Plasma desktop or anything where lots of bugs are fixed constantly.

I think you will not have a great experience with Debian to be honest, but that being said, I have only ran it once for a few weeks. It was very frustrating for me to not have modern versions of software.

One guy below in the comments says he is happy with Gnome 43 which was released 18 months ago I believe. That's what I'm talking about. You will lack almost two years of new features, bug fixes and improvements.

All this because people believe it's more stable. But it's not more stable at all, it's just old already fixed bugs instead of new bugs.

Use Debian or whatever your organization will support.

i cant say enough about mint. its handled all the nonsense ive thrown at it and then some.

Linux Mint is the best IMHO, if you just want a worry free experience, in terms of what you might need and find it in gui form.

The distro that comes to mind is LMDE ( Linux Mint on Debian ). The Mint team adds some polish, a better out-of-the-box experience, and some nice desktop tools ( productivity ). In addition, Mint will keep the desktop environment ( Cinnamon ) up to date which counters probably the biggest issue with Debian which is that the software versions get old.

I use EndeavourOS ( a version of Arch ) because, for me, having up to date packages led to higher productivity and greater stability. When I used Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, or others, I was adding 3rd-party repos, PPAs, and compiling stuff outside the package manager. This always led to a mess over time.

These days, the choice of distro matters less as these problems can be handled other ways. Flatpak allows you to install newer GUI apps ( either newer versions or stuff missing from your repos ). This does not work for command-line stuff or the desktop itself. So, Flatpak compliments LMDE which keeps the desktop up-to-date.

A problem I had with distros like Debian and RHEL was that the dev tools get too out of date. These days, that is easily countered by something like Distrobox. Sandboxing the dev environment has other advantages and, if you muck it up it does not impact your system overall. Multiple dev environments can be handy too as the toolchains favoured by different languages can conflict. If you are not familiar with Distrobox, it uses containers ( like Docker ) but it feels like a much better integrated extension of the host system.

If you use Distrobox, you really do not have to use Flatpak if you do not want to. You can essentially layer on the package selection of any other distro on top of your base system.

I have considered this setup myself, Debian as a base with Distrobox on top to access the Arch packages repos and the AUR. LMDE would make sense for me for the same reasons I have to you. Probably the only reason I have not pulled the trigger yet is that, around the time I had this idea, VanillaOS announced their switch to Debian. Vanilla looks like they had much the same idea but are building it into the core concept of the distro. It has not really stabilized yet though.

Ubuntu probably. It will never break.

Pretty much anything stable and mainstream. Think Pop os, Fedora or Linux Mint

Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). It is going to work with little or no configuration after install.

Open SUSE have good hardware support out of the box and better than Arch personally

I find it weird that you do not care for DE since it affects your workflow, but anyway. My take is if you need the latest packages go for Arch if you have the time, Manjaro if you do not and finally Debian for rock solid stability.

Debian or mint