> Any opinions on differences from the Debian/Fedora-based distros?

Despite what the Debian community may say, I find Debian SID to be pretty solid. That's because SID is mostly sourced from all the independent developments without any Debian modifications or customization. It is Debian Testing that is more "alpha" (unstable) than SID, since SID is vanilla and often untouched, while Debian Testing is continuously modified and customized.

Fun fact, I have a working server in production running Debian SID, and it has done so, issue free, for nearly 8 years. Again, my theory is that because it is so vanilla and untouched (from the source), which is why it remains dependable.

For a desktop, which has a lot more components and dependencies, I still find it more toward my liking. I ran a desktop of Debian SID for 3 years, only needing to fix it once (1x). The issue at the time was GRUB and that was an issue with GRUB itself, as the bug impacted more than a few distributions (not just, Debian).

If you're looking for something out of the box and not looking to build everything up, then Siduction Linux, which is built around Debian SID, may be worth checking out.

My desktop interface of choice is KDE and LXQT. KDE was one of the first desktop interfaces for Linux (older than XFCE and Gnome). They've continued their development for decades and have really done a great job fine-tuning things. I used to be an XFCE fan, but I have switched to using LXQT, which is as light on resources but supports Wayland.

Fedora, eh? Every time I have ever tried to like Fedora, they've killed it for me. lol

The most recent issue was they killed off hardware acceleration support for H265 and H264 media codecs, which impacts video playback, streaming, broadcasting, and gaming. There is a "workaround" (now) through RPM Fusion, but it isn't guaranteed to last. Fedora is USA based and in America (as you know) you can patent software. It's why a development such as, for example, VLC Player, could never be developed here. And while certainly, the most recent issue is technically outside of Fedora's control, it is just another thing to add to the list of previous disappointments.

Which is a shame, I have to admit, until that happened, I would have tried to sell you on Fedora 37. lol But if you are a more advanced user, you can try, Nobara.

The Nobara Project is a modified version of Fedora Linux with user-friendly fixes added to it. The distribution comes with certain features that do not ship with the regular Fedora, such as WINE dependencies, OBS Studio, 3rd party codec packages for GStreamer, NVIDIA drivers, and some package fixes. Nobara's latest release is based on Fedora 37. My only reserve is it is a 1-man show, developing that project, and if you visit r/NobaraProject here on Reddit, you can get a good understanding of when things go wrong, they go wrong. It's still worth watching the progress, though, as it does show some promise. I am hoping as the development matures and perhaps if more people contribute, it will be worth giving it a true try.