recarsion

I'm a fan of his other secret ingredient. CHEESE.

You didn't mention your hardware, but gaming in general benefits from a rolling distro for things like latest drivers, latest wine version etc. (Be aware though that if you have an Nvidia card you'll have to run the proprietary driver, the open source one performs poorly.)

I understand being wary of Arch-derivatives, but it sounds like you're the kind of user who would benefit from it and has plenty of experience with Linux, so I can sincerely recommend it. And since this is for a personal computer, nothing bad is really going to happen if it ends up not working out other than the mild annoyance of having to install something else.

But honestly, things don't break all that often, at least for me. For reference, I've been using Endeavour with KDE for a year, and the only real problem I can remember off the top of my head is that Steam was broken for like a week when the new UI rolled out that was somehow incompatible with the current Nvidia driver, but this got fixed with the next update and there was a workaround to make it run with the old UI so it remained usable.

There's also whatis for short summaries

My "trick" is to put it off until I can't bear the mess anymore and then it actually feels like I'm getting something done and I'm doing it because I want to as opposed to it being a pointless chore

KDE and Cinnamon.

Not american but why would you put raisins in mac n cheese?

Idk if it counts as less popular, but I always thought Sublime got too much flak. The popups are annoying, but other than that it's a great editor imo. It doesn't have the bells and whistles of something like VSCode or a full IDE, but that's also why I like it, it's much more snappy and lightweight. And you can still get things like LSP working so for me at least it gives me everything I look for in an editor. I even decided to pay for a license a few years back, considering I make my salary with this thing the cost is negligible.

But don't push snaps as much

Idk, it never quite goes smoothly for me when I try to do anything involving NTFS.

I see why it exists but avoid it (and all other universal package formats) like the plague. Never had a good experience with it.

I legit have no idea how Mint or Pop is not the default by now.