I've never used Mint so wouldn't want to comment but it does seem to get a lot of praise and I can't see why.

EndeavorOS would be my vote. Arch with a GUI installer and horrible theme.

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Gentoo. I say this as someone who used to daily drive it.

And arch too.

definitely ubuntu

Currently my answer is ubuntu. I tried to use lubuntu recently but just so much wasn't working out of the box like nm-applet wasn't running on startup. The apt package manager is really tedious to use too.

This could also be boiled down to my general incompetence when it comes to Ubuntu based systems though :p

RedStar OS

I've got to go with Endeavour. I'm not sure it's so much that it's overrated, but more that the community talks about it as a replacement for Manjaro which is far from the case. The installation may be easier than arch but once it's all up and running you're going to need to be comfortable in the terminal to sort things out. The documentation for endeavour is incredibly lacking too. It's an unnecessary middle step between a "beginner" distro and arch. If you can't follow the arch installation guide on the wiki then you're going to have even more trouble when it comes to endeavour

Debian (Testing) I used it for a good month, and man was I disappointed. Only some things are actually up to date and packaged correctly. The nvidia drivers don't load the drm module because it's not called nvidia-drm on Debian (testing) it's called nvidia-current-drm. Also apt is the worst package manager

Completely agree on Linux Mint, even though it's still one of my favorite distributions and the one I'm using usually. I'm comfortable with the base Ubuntu system but it comes without all the Canonical garbage (like Snap trying to quietly install itself back when I install an APT package).

Still too much bloatware though, and to my knowledge there is no modern, well documented APT based distro with a community active enough that I can fix my issues reasonnably fast.

I guess I will have to make the jump to Arch. Currently happy with my Regolith install now though, so I'm a bit lazy to explore other options.

All the distros that let you install packages from other distros. What's the point?

I'm using ZorinOS with Windows 11 Pro. It's good enough for everything I do.