I know the feeling that it seems to be duct taped together (makes sense since there’s thousands of developers working independently and collaboratively, unlike under Microsoft or Apple) and it sometimes infuriates me how each and every distribution has their easy install points, and yet confound certain other points.

For instance I want a Chinese IME? Fedora will get that done in a minute, but Arch varying results from install from terminal of fcitx and adding lines to a config. On the other hand Arch AUR has optimised software and mirrors for my region of the world.

Don’t know if you tried Gnome but I love it for some reason, maybe because it’s so different and customisable via extensions. So yeah, enjoy the ride!

Fedora, so most Gnome based distros. KDE as commented beside me. Arch-based EndeavourOS.