Update: I chose mint. I can trust Mint to update the backend.
I'm about to switch back to Debian.Any reason I don't know of that Elementary OS would be a bad idea? I know Debian. I don't know the nuances of Arch or red hat.
I found my final missing FOSS video editor that finally gets me off Windows. I've been having issues with indexing on windows, and they keep turning on that fucking reminder to sign into One drive even after I destroy it with a registry change.
I would suggest pop os instead. I can't remember all the specifics but when I used elementary, they ended up changing a lot of stuff in an upgrade that didn't float my boat.
What I do remember is that there is no system tray and the creators are philosophically very against having one (despite that still being a somewhat common design pattern that apps rely on), theming support got janky with the upgrade, and Nvidia support was not great.
Of course, Nvidia on Linux has a lot of issues all around but at the time I had one of those cards and pop os worked mostly fine despite that. I'm still on pop os due to what I perceived as a bad direction that elementary took back then. That was around 2021 iirc.
On the plus side, pop os is wonderful! It's like Ubuntu minus all the bad parts and plus a lot of good ones. It feels very fast and I don't really recall the last time I felt like I was fighting against it as a distro.
See, you kinda painted my mindset of why I made this post. Sometimes I felt like I was playing with eOS more than I was just using my computer apps. I was fighting to make sure they worked all the time.
Yea seems to be a big go to for some. I'll be using my distro with an 1135g7 and 32gb ram. So anything I use shouldnt chug. I'm just concerned about performance on integrated graphics for proton purposes.