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You’re going to distro hop (we all do) so just start somewhere. It’s debian based, so what you learn will be applicable to like 80% of the distros out there.
I like gnome. Plasma is nice too. Lately I’ve just been using minimal i3 window manager.
Good luck!
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.