It’s not that complicated, though many want to make it…
If you have a decent CPU (an i5 or i9, or an AMD) — and, say 16 GB of RAM, then I would simply recommend Ubuntu (take the latest 2024 or 2026 — pick an even year, so it’s LTS — Long Term Support, means less frequent updates).
If you want to start hacking (white or black hat), you can always add those packages. If you want extra networking, you can always add the packages, same goes for LVM, Office, music and movies, anything really.
Don’t believe all the junk about this is the package you MUST pick… Once you pick a Linux distro, if you want to change the UI, you can change it later. If you want to change your flavor, that too is changeable. With Linux you are NOT locked into one distro. Same goes for your hardware, You get this fun new NVidia, just get it install it — it’ll work right our of the box, then you update your drivers and you’ll get new matching drivers (free, no hassle). You add RAM to your machine, no big deal, go for it.
You decide to add more SWAP (virtual RAM) to your machine, again, no big deal, just a few lines.
I’ve been using Linux for over twenty years. (sorry THIRTY years — trusty calculator speaks the truth)
Updates are good, but unless you’re doing something you shouldn’t be… they are not that critical. Update always, reboot rarely — Here is the “w” from one of my servers: w
15:42:32 up 897 days, 9 min, 3 users, load average: 0.07, 0.07, 0.01
For my lovely wife, she’s a chronic browser tab opener — that is a special situation where you will probably need 32-64 or more gigabytes of RAM.
Dr Abigail Joseph (BTW she’s a Doctor of Computer Science)
Oh, I should point out that I’ve used RHEL (RedHat Enterprise Linux), CentOS, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, OpenWRT, and many more…