Haven't liked Ubuntu since like... one of the 8 or 9 releases. Whenever the Pulseaudio switch happened and the distro stopped "Just Working". They've just gotten weirder and farther from what I want since then (yes I know all major distros use PulseAudio now—that's besides the point).

I default to Debian on the server but I just want a good base to run modern software development desktop software on. IDEs, docker, browsers, the occasional VM or image editor. That sort of thing. It's a hell of a gaming machine so being able to do some of that's a big bonus—waste of all this power when off the clock if I can't fire up games on it.

I'm most comfortable in Arch or Gentoo or Void or something along those lines, but that comfort's just because I'd rather be making something simple work than fixing something complex that's broken—either way it's fundamentally a waste of time, neither productive nor fun, and I'd prefer to avoid it these days.

The Suse suggestion in this thread's interesting. Kinda forgot it existed—haven't used it since 2004 or something. Might try that.

I really just want a distro that gives me a non-broken desktop on fairly boring, non-exotic hardware. I haven't really felt like I got that out of Linux in 20 years of trying off an on (more on than off) but it's 2020, right? Some of these companies make money from what they do. One of them must actually work. Win10's one of only three Windows I've hated and Apple's back on the "3x" side of its "1.5x-3x" markup range it swings between so I just want... peace, really.

If you want that, then just pick linux friendly hardware, it's the only path that doesn't lead to misery.

Haha, I'm pretty sure I did. Wayland just seems to have invented new and wonderful ways for applications to crash the entire windowing system. As if Xorg weren't good enough at that already. Most of the rest of my problems are with the quality of software packaging. Sigh.

You can disable Wayland in Fedora. Edit /etc/gdm/custom.conf.