Cinnamon is the new hotness
Discussion
I used that on mint for a while. It was nice, and wasn’t a resource hog.
I’ve installed it on Ubuntu instead of their terrible idea of gnome. Debian did gnome well
I’ve always had issues with Debian because I always forgot to get the non-free installer, or my hardware required a newer kernel, so aside from server VM’s I don’t have much experience with it unfortunately. I’ve tended to lean redhat/fedora for a long time, or SuSE.
NixOS is my first real adventure in a while.