Or the current Debian testing, which will become stable soon. If you have experience with a Ubuntu from 10 years ago, you might know about apt already. If not, the package manager is already integrated into gnome-software. Additionally you can easily enable Flathub for flatpak and install packages using gnome-software afterwards.

And yes, I would avoid Ubuntu on the desktop because of snap and other weird choices for defaults.

On the server however my experiences with Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 were not bad. But if it were my choice I would go Debian stable for servers.

If you want to do less maintenance, Fedora has good defaults and will have major updates twice a year. But, if you don't want to get custom to new things on your machine that often, Debian is my recommendation.

Only if you have too much time, try Gentoo. I've used it for more than 15 years on the desktop besides Debian on Raspberries.