My go to back in The Day was just Ubuntu because I was lazy. We're talking the 14.04/16.04 days. Ubuntu was simple and mostly just worked. I now find myself needing to de-spywareify as the coming administration is likely to force Microsoft into tracking "dissidents" so need to get back into weaning myself off the Windows teat.
I recently dualbooted my main desktop with Ubuntu 24.04 and have been... entirely underwhelmed. The whole separation between APT and snap packages doesn't work well together and is really the big problem I have, as a lot of standard deb packages just refuse to install properly now. the UI is hard to use and doesn't make me happy, and it's not been playing nice with my Zen 4 desktop when it comes to ACPI power states (no sleep, doesn't reliably turn the power off when i ask it to turn off, etc). So overall, I am just not terribly interested in using Ubuntu anymore.
What I primarily want is the sort of "mostly just works" like old 16.04 but still gave you the full ability to monkey under the hood- and is also something based on a normal distro that most people write guides for because I am a smoothbrain. Should I just head to using basic plain jane Debian or something?
Every time I try a new distro I end up back on Debian. It just works.
Same. I can barely even tell what "good" Ubuntu brings to the table other than the task bar icons, which I just add in with am extension.