penguin202124 (he/him)

I’d say VSCodium, Kate or Vim. VSCodium if you want something like VSCode, Kate for just an absolutely amazing IDE or Vim if you want to try something new.

Fedora KDE. It’s easy to setup, modern, customizable and fast. Second would be Mint, it’s only flaws is that it ships an older kernel (might be a pain) and uses X11 (insecure).

I second this. uBlue is amazing if you want something that just works and doesn’t break.

just works

After compiling and configuring for a few hours sure

That’s very true. However even still I don’t think beginners should use distros which are unstable until they learn Linux a bit more.

Flatpak exists and even if you don’t use them its repos are huge.

I agree. Whenever I use Arch or Arch-based distros they are always very unstable. That is fine if you like a learning curve, but if you don’t (like OP) then they probably aren’t for you.

I’d say Fedora KDE. It just works, the docs are good, it has a big community and large enough repos.

Alpine Linux. It’s pretty lightweight (uses ~250MiB on idle with sway), is easy to install and is super stable. My only criticism is that there is quite a lot of software not available in the repos, but this is mainly fixed by flatpaks.