I went for Nixos (distro) with Plasma (desktop environment). Nixos has a great package manager (99% of the things there just work)and the way you install things is essentially having a list of your packages/apps. Deleting them is just as easy and the best part is that it’s totally gone, no lingering random files that could bite me in the future. If you mess up your configuration bad it’ll force you to stay the working version if you don’t like what you did you’ll revert it. Plasma has incredible defaults and you can click around in it to fine tune to your liking. Plug things into plasma is just works at least for me. I’ve plugged midi controllers, audio interface, dock, hdmi, game controllers first try no fuss. Oh I’m sure other distros have this as well but fun fact if your bt is on and the laptop is connected to a speaker you can just connect your phone (or any other bt source) and use your laptop as a bt speaker. And I mean it just works again. Yeah sure you need to pair it first. But boy oh boy Im playing on the tv and i can just bt to it and play my tunes like it’s nothing. Back to the question in hand. I have a windows version of Ableton 11 that I installed there with 3rd party vst 2 and 3 plugins figuring that one out took me longer but it was in front of me all the time so in hindsight that wasn’t too hard either. So that was my new generation Arch btw xD aka NixOS btw. The tl dr is that I find Nixos with KDE Plasma 6 having very friendly defaults that can be built on if and when you ready