Echoing the other sentiments, it's probably a good idea to hunt down why your system is having trouble because distro hopping might not fix it.
That being said I've recently been using bazzite and it's been relatively smooth. You just have to learn a couple (easy) ways to do package management a little differently.
Some of the questions about distros don't take into account those of us who have been using Linux since the mid-90s. Your scope here seems to be directed at the last decade or so.
RedHat 5.3 with fvwm (or fvwm95) is very nostalgic for me because it was one of the few walnut creek CDs I managed to get working. Mandrake and early SuSe were cute as well.
I'd wager it uses systemd considering Lennart Poettering works for Microsoft.
I sure hope this meme was edited or the op is satire. The dead internet has messed so many people up.
The distinction is irrelevant and "AI" is what businesses and normal folks call this stuff. Just like the age old arguments that the media should say something like "cyber criminals" instead of "hackers" or "cloud" is just other people's computers. LLM, GNU/spicy-auto-correct, whatever. To the populous it's all "AI".
I absolutely love it. Easy to find newer versions of things than what's in my distro's repos, easy to update. The only snags I've encountered is sometimes (very rarely) a program won't have access to part of my storage or my system's dark theme isn't applied. The former is super rare and the latter is usually 5min of searching the web to remember how to change the theme for a flatpak.
EDIT: after reading some of the other comments, I should mention that I only use it for GUI applications. I've not yet tried any TUI/CLI applications as flatpaks.
There's a really fine line between needing a spreadsheet and needing a database and I've not yet found it. It's probably more fuzzy than I realized but I have participated on so many programming projects that amounted to a spreadsheet that lived too long.
I used a pro 7+ for a while with Fedora on it and it ran just fine. The stylus worked generally well, too. Eventually I put Win 11 back on it to be able to use the camera (it was not yet supported by the linux-surface project and still may not be?) and it worked well enough with WSL that I kept it that way. I generally spent my time in firefox and windows terminal with little to no trouble at all (after de-clawing windows the best I could).
Note that the keyboard is about what you'd expect for such a flat thing. I'm pretty sure it's rubber dome and not butterfly switches. It's not a great experience but it's no worse than your average laptop.
I couldn't agree with this comment more! cod:m is a blast and runs on a lot of devices, even google-free ones.
MX Linux
Option for no systemd, great community, good overall appearance, great set of custom tools.
Mint
Generally works in cases where Ubuntu would and you don't have to deal with Canonical's choices.
I have posted regularly on the hurtdesk but this user still tries to impersonate me. I am hobbsc not handyc. You can c my trouble, clearly. handyc must go.