Possibly the best advice here re: the distro. While it helps to have people give you suggestions, the person who it really needs to work for is you, the user. Don’t let popular opinion turn you away from what works for you, OP. Experiment and play. It costs nothing to put on a new system. Also, if you put your home/ directory on its own partition, you can experiment with variations of the same types, like the all the variations of Ubuntu. I’m pretty sure modern installers even back up the dotfiles that exist in your current home/ directory for you, so you don’t even have to worry about old dotfiles breaking anything.