Unfortunately if you ask "Hey what distro should I use" some of the responses will be things like Manjaro. Even Mint wasn't 100% fiddling free last time I trie

Unfortunately if you ask "Hey what distro should I use" some of the responses will be things like Manjaro. Even Mint wasn't 100% fiddling free last time I tried, anything using traditional package management is never going to be reliable as far as I can tell. Expecting a dozen modern apps updated constantly with 100 overlapping dependencies each to not have conflicts seems completely insane. The whole idea came from the era of systems maintained by hand over time, sometimes with things compiled from source, mostly using simple CLI software.