I think your response has so far been the most comprehensive. Thank you so much.

This is a thing of the past. With the excellent Distrobox, you can install any package from any distro on whatever distro you’re running.

I’d not heard of Distrobox sounds to me to be a perfect foil to the disparate package solutions out there. It gives me some peace of mind about not being locked into a package manager (Although as you point out, even without distrobox that wouldn’t be an issue).

Lastly, some distros and/or (so-called) desktop environments might collect telemetry to improve themselves. But this is done in a way that suits free and open source software. Thankfully, if you’ve got problems with this, you can always turn it off.

I’ve really not got any problems with telemetry so long as it’s just limited to the technicals and for OS improvement purposes. Sounds like I should be fine.

So, all distros allow you to tinker. My question is: What is it you’re tinkering with?

“Tinkering” in my case is pretty broad. You’re correct when you suppose that I like to mess with UI aesthetics and workflows. The other misc tinkering I more mentioned in case there’s some distros that are unsuited to working with strange or niche programs (such as the media encoding and physical media management stuff I mentioned). It sounds like that’s not really much of a problem though. Anyway what counts as “niche” is very subjective so probably wasn’t that helpful to mention.

Have you considered Bazzite?

I have not heard of Bazzite. It kinda looks to be perfect if I end up going with Fedora (It’s the most recommended so far). My only concern is longevity, It seems to be quite new and I don’t want to jump on just for it to be a flash in the pan. As I understand it though, even if it is, it’s easy enough to change distros. Others have said to not be worried about locking oneself in and to just jump in and try. Also not a fan of “Gaming Mode” style UI but I guess I can just not use it.

Out of everything, this could be a slight concern. You could make it work through Wine, and it seems to have decent results. If you’re not opposed to using Photoshop CC 2021, there’s this GitHub repo worth looking at as well.

Honestly, not married to Photoshop at all. That’s just what I use and I’m not any sort of power user by any measure.

Again, thank you very much for your detailed response.

Good recommendation. Seems like it’d be a good way to rapidly try a few. I’ll look into it. Thank you kindly.

Wow, that was really comprehensive and clear, thank you. I’ll digest and factor into the deliberations. Reckon I’ll also switch to AMD with my next build. Main reason I went Intel/Nvidea is cuz AMD’s old reputation was still ringing in my ears when I build it.

I love a bit of shameless self promotion. Especially if it’s that comprehensive.

Cheers. Sounds like package management is going to be a bit of a learning experience but what isn’t? Should end up being fine

Copy that. Sounds like I’m off to set up a Boot USB.

Couldn’t say anything in particular. I think I was looking for Plasma KDE default and it claims to have the stability, support and ease of use of Ubuntu while ripping out the stuff people didn’t like that canonical put in.