Could be snapless in a minimal install, but if you need Firefox, Chromium, Thunderbird or a bunch of other useful stuff they all come as a snap package

I’m in a similar situation. I’ve used Kubuntu (Ubuntu + KDE) for more than a decade now, and it has mostly worked beautifully. Over the years, memorable problems were a few issues with GPU drivers, GRUB shenanigans and the occasional amateurish KDE UX fuckup. But in general I found the whole experience much better than what I saw on Windows during the time.

However, for a while now Ubuntu is breaking my #1 rule of software products: Do not annoy your users. Every update they are trying to push (and fix) their useless Snap architecture a bit more, and every updates makes things effectively worse. Examples: displaying annoying popups to tell you that Snap app x needs to be updated and that the app has to be closed for that, but not updating it when closing the app, trying to fix that in the latest version by auto installing the latest snap with a popup and progress bar when closing the app (making me wait to turn off my computer till it’s finished - I just finished my work and want to go home please), numerous interoperability issues because snap apps run in some kind of sandbox and don’t play nice with regular (Debian and Linux) mechanisms, and so on. It’s an absolute shitshow, and I think they have now annoyed me, personally, long enough. I need to find something better.

Ah. I just needed that off my chest. Maybe I should give Mint a try

I think OP wants something that also minimizes the "set“ part. Arch is for enthusiasts who like to put a lot of effort into creating their own perfect Linux system. I’ve tried it once and to be perfectly honest I don‘t want to fiddle around with basic settings if there is no need to. I’m pretty busy with other things in my life and want stuff to work out of the box with sane defaults if possible. It’s essential that stuff can easily be customized afterwards though.

Arch is very good for people who want to invest time into learning what goes on under the hood. Perfectly valid use case, but probably not for OP.