IMO Ubuntu has been the best bet for linux on the desktop since about 2006.
They occasionally do things people dislike, but it’s always easy to pick a different flavour (Xubuntu and Ubuntu-mate are great examples IMO), and the underlying distro is reliable and stable.
I’m also a big fan of LTS releases, and supported upgrade paths between them.
/2c
I thought Mint was the big thing. (I’m not big on Linuxnews, just what I heard.)
I was considering it, but I’ve done little auditions of Ubuntu over the last 10 years and something doesn’t feel right. It was awesome in the late '00s, but it hasn’t clicked with me since. Maybe it was the 1-2 pow of trying to make a phone OS and then the phone-looking launcher.
Thanks for the tip, though. I’ll give it a go if my next candidate gets too messy. (Yes, it’s definitely the distros’ fault, not mine. Okay, maybe 20% mine. Or 95%. Something like that.)