Arch + KDE: i like the aur and the easy building of packages in general KDE has a nice ootb expirience and i can work on it without much difference even on major changes. The desktop is easy to understand for people migrating and can be customized extensivly.

Arch + i3 is what I used until a couple years ago, then decided to move to Wayland, and Sway was buggy on my system so I went vanilla Gnome. It does all I need and also I get to have my settings in a simple script file which is just a bunch of gsettings calls.

I still think that the i3 way of managing windows is amazing, but I actually rarely needed lots of windows in the same workspace tiled.

I only have one extension installed from the package manager for the tray and that's it. Also on Fedora now only because of some proprietary software I need to run, but I also like the distro.

Bodhi + lxde

Xfce.

Understands Windows-style keyboard navigation and shortcuts, which is way faster than reaching for a mouse and trying to aim at anything on screen.

For speed, learn _all_ the keyboard shortcuts. I mostly use my mouse only in web browsers: everything else is keyboard-driven.

I also rate Ubuntu's Unity for this. Looks like macOS but understands all the Windows keystrokes, even quite obscure ones.

For example the QuickLaunch bar, added in Win98 and deprecated from Vista on.

https://www.ancsite.com/bringing-back-windows-xp-style

Windows + 1...9 opens the n th item in the QL toolbar. Win+1 opens the first pinned app, Win+2 the second, Win+3 the third, etc. This works in Unity.

From Ubuntu to ArchLinux or Rocky is a big change. But let's go!

Manjaro + XFCE4 or Plasma Why? Arch based and let's you get into the ArchLinux world of doing things. AUR is a huge plus.

RockyLinux + XFCE4 or Plasma A rock solid distro that put's you to learn the same commands for the Red Hat world. Since most software works on Fedora, it will work here.

So my desktop is ArchLinux + XFCE4 but my favorite is Plasma. All my other RHEL or Rocky have no desktop environment, only terminal.

I don't like Ubuntu for so many reasons but many people use it. Instead of Ubuntu, I would prefer Debian.

Stay away from? Fedora, CentOS, and all other, unless you want to test those, but you can do it on a VM.

For example, Alpine is great but for some specific scenarios.

Also choose a systemd distro. If you want to test a systemd-less distro, do it on a vm.