No worries. I feel your frustration. As a longtime Fedora Workstation user, I keep coming back to it. Linus uses Fedora, and QubesOS uses Fedora as their default template, and I have been quite pleased with it over the years.

Give the live OS a spin; Workstation or KDE Plasma, pick your preference—you might like it. 42 beta is shaping up to be a fantastic Edition release.

As you most likely can tell, I am really enjoying this KDE Plasma beta. The integration and customization options make it feel personalized, more welcoming, and improve my experience—I actually find myself wanting to use my computer more.

Ubuntu is generally a good recommendation for beginners, but I couldn't imagine daily driving it in lieu of Debian. Pop!_OS is ready-made for gamers, but it didn't last long on my system. If you like System76's COSMIC desktop environment, there is also a Fedora Cosmic Spin.

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Pop is so out of date now because they've failed to ship 24.04, which makes it a really bad gaming distro. Been really liking Bazzite on a dedicated gaming console I built, which is Fedora-based and immutable. I'm a big fan of KDE Plasma and am definitely leaning toward Fedora! Is there a good spin for development work as well as gaming?

Immutable OSes are very interesting, but I know dealing with workarounds can be more trouble than it's worth on a dev system, hence why I'm thinking of plain ole Fedora.

Lots of gamers like Nobara—it's an independently released modified version of Fedora with a bunch of user-friendly fixes and tweaks. They don't just preinstall stuff; they actually patch and modify things to make gaming performance better. They have five different versions: Official KDE, clean GNOME, clean KDE, and two Steam Deck-like options for HTPC and handheld devices.

Admittedly, I haven't yet tested it out, but people seem to love it. I am not a big desktop gamer, so I prefer the thoroughly tested Fedora Edition releases for my daily driver. Fedora only supports and includes free and open-source software, so 3rd-party proprietary packages are always absent from a fresh install, but they are easily enabled.