5 years ago I would default to Mint because of how pain free the installation and setup process was. It would magically fix all the sound/sleep/firmware etc. issues other distros had.

Now Debian has caught up to it IMHO. Yes, you still have to add some non-free repos or firmware packages but it’s really easy and after that it’s mostly smooth sailing. The stability and simplicity of Debian is hard to beat. I’ve spent years on testing version and never had a single issue with an upgrade. It’s rock solid.

In my experience Ubuntu LTS seems to do the best at checking whatever bullshit checkboxes the know-nothing corporate cybersecurity auditmonkeys care about.

Debian exists. Ubuntu wants to go Pro. Mint is squished in the middle. Fedora is doing mad science, and OpenSuSE is in full “We have Fedora at home” mode. Arch arches, and Bazzite is in an existential crisis over the coming x86 32-bit apocalypse. Also Nix is nixing, I guess. All the inbetweeners are trying desperately to be relevant and up to date.

I wanna give a shoutout to Manjaro, an arch based distro with a cascading testing cycle for better stability. That being said, I am using Arch and Manjaro for about a decade now and never really had any stability issues (in contrast to my tries with Ubuntu). The arch wiki stays one of the absolute best resources for Linux users on the internet, the rolling release ensures cutting edge Software, the AUR makes it very easy to provide community built packages. And then there’s Debian. Definitely my choice for servers.

Still using a mix of Debian and Ubuntu.

I tried openSUSE but didn’t like it compared to Ubuntu desktop.

Doing the best for which use-case? The answers will be fundamentally different depending on the situation