I've been having a reasonably good experience with Pop OS, which is Ubuntu-based but different in a bunch of ways. The makers (System76) put it on the computers

I've been having a reasonably good experience with Pop OS, which is Ubuntu-based but different in a bunch of ways. The makers (System76) put it on the computers they sell so they have a strong incentive to make it "just work", and that seems to have mostly worked out well. As someone with years of light Linux experience but no patience for pissing about with config all day, my golden rule is to avoid updating anything ahead of the version that the distro bundles. E.g. no I shall not be updating my Nvidia drivers independently! I like docker for arbitrary command line software I haven't checked the source for, Flatpak (or Snap/AppImage I guess) for big complicated GUI software, and if those aren't options I sometimes run things in a VM if I don't trust them not to screw up the system (hello Tizen Studio!). I ended up installing Blender from Steam, of all places.