

I would honestly love to share my stuff but I’m afraid that what I have to share contains too much identifying information with screenshots and all. I probably spent 24 hours in total with my current install and at least triple as much getting a previous Cinnamon install that I screwed up because I went to the experimental Wayland session to look and act a certain way. Back when I studied architecture we would consider all the failed attempts as a natural and indeed deeply necessary aspect of design, therefore I count the previous install as being the starting point of my current one. I hope that made sense. All of this is to say that I spent an inordinate amount of my recent life on this. I would love to share, but my paranoia is really keeping me from doing that. It took me 24 hours alone to create a decent repository of thematically and aesthetically matched backgrounds with all the selecting and editing of images. There is just so much that you have to do.

Debian is kind of too big to fail. Maybe NixOS if you want something that will almost certainly gain popularity in the future.
Don’t think though that distros are the layer which you want to look at. Lots of stuff happens at the level of DEs, drivers and individual apps, which sure is preconditioned by the distro you choose but at the same time not that strict of a thing. You can get anything working provided you have the time.
x11 is still in its last round before retirement it seems, using Wayland is going to future proof what you’ve got majorly.
My 2c. Feel free to critique.