Ah ok, you wanted something new and to experiment and wanted the most up to date thing without going into “side branches”.
I also really understand wanting to use a mainline Linux, I’m prouder of using main vanilla ass Debian since it feels more official and respected to present myself professionally saying “yes, I use Linux, my distro is Debian” instead of “I use mint because I need more handholding” or “I use Nobara/Pika because I am a 420 blaze it gamer”.
I did similar stuff to you, if you’re interested you can check out my journey. However, during this distro hop I did come more to terms with understanding distros are basically DE + package manager + bundled software, with a few differences and outliers.
Which led me to having the fun situation where I hated MATE, uninstalling it from my Ubuntu mate install, putting on KDE, distro hopping and when I went for Debian net install, repeating the KDE install after being shocked that a bare bones Debian install has no DE.
I did it again for a trashtop that I have, removing LMDE’s default DE and installing XFCE because I didn’t like… Cinnamon?
Ah ok, you wanted something new and to experiment and wanted the most up to date thing without going into “side branches”.
I also really understand wanting to use a mainline Linux, I’m prouder of using main vanilla ass Debian since it feels more official and respected to present myself professionally saying “yes, I use Linux, my distro is Debian” instead of “I use mint because I need more handholding” or “I use Nobara/Pika because I am a 420 blaze it gamer”.
I did similar stuff to you, if you’re interested you can check out my journey. However, during this distro hop I did come more to terms with understanding distros are basically DE + package manager + bundled software, with a few differences and outliers.
Which led me to having the fun situation where I hated MATE, uninstalling it from my Ubuntu mate install, putting on KDE, distro hopping and when I went for Debian net install, repeating the KDE install after being shocked that a bare bones Debian install has no DE.
I did it again for a trashtop that I have, removing LMDE’s default DE and installing XFCE because I didn’t like… Cinnamon?