silentjohn

Usually, my attempts to use it are either thwarted by issues installing, issues booting, or general problems while using it… leading to “catastrophic failure” that I can’t fix without digging into hours of research and terminal commands.

This was my experience as well ... 20 years ago. I've not had many of these issues over the past few years using any distro. I used Debian for a couple years and now I'm on Arch. Really, it just works for me...

TBH now that I think about it, I ran in to more issues with Ubuntu than just simply using Debian.

Why would they?

They're all basically the same dude. They're all GNU/Linux. You have 2 main distros: Debian and Arch. Fedora is a kind of inbetween, there's SUSE as well, but mostly it's all Debian and Arch.

Mint, Ubuntu, etc ... it's all just Debian. Use Debian.You can use KDE plasma or Gnome or i3 or whatever you want.

Stable yea. My PC is a bit older (7 years) and I've never had any issues with hardware, even with my nvidia card.

Basically every distro is based on either arch or debian (some exceptions). I've been perfectly happy with debian, even as a gamer.