Gentoo, Qubes on desktops. Cent, Gentoo, Alpine and OpenBSD for servers.

Then there’s weird stuff like MirageOS, DuskOS, openwrt, opnsense and I’m 90% sure there’s a laptop with Kali purple in my trunk.

For other people I usually install fedora spins or bazzite.

People rarely maintain open source curses. Manjaro withstanding.

Perl is perfect for curses you have no intention of maintaining. You can pack more dark magic per line.

I do like cosmic. XFCE also works on wayland now. Lots of options.

Fedora Kionite because no one likes gnome 3. Suse ane ubuntu are also good choices. SELinux or Apparmor? That is the question.