As someone who has been happy with both Arch and Gentoo for non-gaming purposes, my hot take in 2025 is that I cannot recommend good old Debian enough. Homebrew/cargo for bleeding edge software, but since that lives in my home folder it doesn’t affect or interfere with the rock solid experience of Debian. I use Lutris for Windows-exclusive games, and actually have better performance than in Windows thanks to Microsoft’s unholy levels of bullshit in their OS.

But yeah: Debian truly “just works”, with the caveat of initial setup for Nvidia cards. And I would say that certain Gnome extensions are kind of mandatory as well, but the IX of installing those is ridiculously good for what they are.