Depends on your experience level and willingness to tinker. The bad news is that in my experience, you always end up opening a terminal and fiddling with config

Depends on your experience level and willingness to tinker. The bad news is that in my experience, you always end up opening a terminal and fiddling with configuration files no matter what distribution you use. The good news is that if you are OK doing that, you don't actually need that much from your distribution other than the useful trick of keeping itself up to date. Ubuntu is alright. But you trade off up to date software for stability. And the bi-annual upgrades to the latest LTS are a bit of a PITA and don't always go that smoothly. And you end up running older kernel and whatever else was current around the time they freeze their LTS version. So, for something that is supposed to be user friendly and stable, it actually ends up having a lot of issues and not being all that stable over time. If you want to get the best possible experience with graphics, you basically need the latest kernels, drivers, fixes, etc. as soon as they get released. Ubuntu doesn't deliver that because you get stuck on either the yearly or LTS release. These days I prefer rolling release style distributions. It's just less hassle in the end and not really less stable for me. The opposite actually in my experience. You could go with Debian testing, fedora, and a few other options. But I ended up using Manjaro which is based on arch linux. My reason is simple: the SteamDeck uses a distribution that is based on arch linux. I wanted to run steam on my laptop. So, I figured that using what Valve themselves seem to actively support and invest in makes a whole lot of sense. I've not been disappointed with this so far (three years and counting). Installing games is easy. Getting things like Gnome, Steam, etc installed via pac is easy. And I can install whatever via snap, flatpak, or native arch packages. More importantly, everything stays up to date and fresh. After three years I have no need to reinstall my laptop because it's fine. Every once in a while I need to deal with some minor issues after some update for which the solution usually is a Google search away. But other than that, Manjaro has been rock solid for me. And besides, I've never used a Linux distribution in 30 years that didn't have that issue.