I run Mint Cinnamon. It’s been Rock solid for me. You can modify, add, remove whatever you want. With Flatpacks you are mostly up to date. If you want to install a newer kernel you can, and if you have Timeshift running and something breaks, you just roll back.
I see Mint as an Un-enshittified Ubuntu.
I find cinnamon very frienly and comfortable, which I need in a daily driver. To play I have things like NixOS. I could Arch, but I’m not vegan. :)
That said, I’m giving Fedora Kinoite (Atomic) a try in a VM