This is the kind of thing that's easy to say but hard to do
berryjam
Welp, I guess you did
Nobody said Arch yet? The wiki is very comprehensive so you can get by if you're a newbie plus learn a lot.
If you want to work with the terminal as much as possible, it's a decent choice. I only start X/my graphical environment if I need to do non-writing/non-coding activities.
You may need a day to configure wifi, Bluetooth, your de/wm of choice, etc., but if you use Ethernet & just install xfce you should be able to hit the ground running.
Are you okay with your diary being consumed by copilot?
What do you use for email?
And what's the alternative? Genuine question
I have no idea. This was more than 5 years ago. Fwiw I now use Arch (sans Gnome) and I'm very happy with the experience.
It's very fast and nearly always gives me the results I want without extra bullshit. For example using bc or qalc to do a quick unit conversion vs launching a calculator app for the same purpose.
Ubuntu. I hated not being able to customize certain things and it had some interesting bugs on my hardware. Switching to a different distro solved those issues
The wiki holds your hand through it so it's pretty easy.