Ubuntu isn't what it used to be, unfortunately. I'm pretty much in love with Aurora [1] nowadays. It's an immutable distro (for a smartphone-like upgrade experience) based on Fedora and KDE, rock solid, sane defaults, a good selection of dev tools, proper nvidia support if you want it, and it feels really snap!

[1] https://getaurora.dev/

Just curious, what do you think Aurora itself does better than regular fedora kde?

I haven't used plain Fedora much, but Aurora just 'feels' more coherent, polished and stable than other distro's I have used in recent years. I tend to notice bugs/rough edges in all of them, but Aurora somehow just works. Having a strictly fixed core allows it to be fine-tuned better, I guess? Or perhaps it's just in my head. :-)

All non-core software is provided by Flathub (through the Discover app) and Brew (for cli apps). Both have worked flawlessly for me as well.

It also pisses me off, but I am not paying for Apple prices on personal devices, and since Slackware 2.0 back in 1995, that there is always something that makes me waste weekends on GNU/Linux, so Windows it is.

I already split time. I have an old Dell laptop running Ubuntu that I do a lot of types of dev on plus general browsing (I'm actually on it right now). I use Windows for games and gamedev, though as I use Godot for gamedev I could pretty easily do that on Linux as well.

Mint and/or Fedora, depending on how new your software needs to be.

Ubuntu pushing snaps like MS was the last straw.

You want to escape slow UI and bad corporate rulers... and you chose Ubuntu?!

Dude... Mint, Arch / Manjaro, Void, even Alpine is better. Plenty of good and very lean+mean options out there.

Ubuntu is the Windows of the Linux world. Has been for several years now.

Try looking up what Canonical did and still does with the Snap store.