Fedora

Xubuntu. It is Ubuntu with XFCE. Windowing systems are often surprisingly crappy in multi-screen situation. XFCE may not be most refined, but what it does is robust and without surprises.

A long while ago, I used Ubuntu. Then Mint. I had upgrade issues with both of those. Moved to Fedora kind of piecemeal after that. When I built a new gaming machine in 2020, that's what I used; no Windows on that machine. I've had very few compatibility issues. Granted, I don't play multiplayer at all (beyond Minecraft and Roblox, when my kid wants to play).

Alpine

By the time each Windows version draws to an untimely end, I've usually got so much unused space on my drive that I mainly shrink the "C:" volume containing the original Windows installation that the PC was shipped with.

Then creating an additional partition and installing the new Windows version there for a traditional multi-boot system.

This has been going on for decades.

Not shrinking all the way, but quite a bit. You just need enough free original space remaining for the old Windows version to operate nominally since you will be spending more time in W11 (or Linux) going forward. For instance on a W10 PC I'm not going to be using it on the internet very much between now and when I stop for good later this year. Probably not installing any new apps at all on W10 any more. Especially since I already have W11 on the next partition :)

So W10 won't really be needing all the space it had on its C: volume to begin with any more.

And that next partition now has the vast majority of the free space that the original partition had, i.e. plenty.

But if you are booted to W10 when you find yourself needing more storage space, well it's all there on the next partition where W11 resides. At which point W11 is sitting there dormant in its folders on something like a D: volume, but there's plenty space there for you to make all kind of folders of your own. Which you can easily have continued access to when rebooted back to W11. Or rebooted to Linux however you like :)

If your W10 offline apps and games (which may run better than W11) are doing fine I don't like to lose them, when the time comes I'll be disabling ethernet & wifi in W10 device manager in case the PC's accidentally connected to a router when I boot back to W10.

Plus with an external drive to mainly store bulky folders, you end up with enough room internally to next shrink W11 and make a third primary partition for Linux :)

I don't do that on every PC but I do like Mint and Debian these days.

Because I've been a traditional Windows user and Mint has good similarity to Windows to an extent, then getting accustomed to Debian can be better preparation for other forms of Linux.

There are also a number of old PC's that still have on their drive a single "obsolete" version of Windows, which is never used on the internet any more, except when booted to a "Live" Linux distribution on a USB drive to try out different versions of Linux as they emerge and evolve. This is mainly done without any changes to the drive that Windows is on at all.

That technique has been going on since before USBs took over from CDROMs for live booting Linux. Regardless, ISOs still serve their purpose as the ideal lingua franca for Linux distributions.

Debian, because it's the most stable one I've found, and it's the only one I've tried that worked "out of the box" on the majority of my machines.

Pop OS

Alpine Linux for my routers, firewalls, servers. Why: Tiny, simple, elegant, no BS.

MX Linux for my daily driver. Why: Based on Debian. No SystemD yet still boots instantly. Trivial to image and restore using its own tools. Options for supporting old hardware or the latest hardware. My fallback OS is Void.

Mint and Arch