i almost went with aurora here. in fact it’s still on the other pc i was also testing on, sitting on a shelf unused the last several months. but after trying out pretty much everything i could get my hands on… i ended up back ‘home’, on debian. where i started ~ 30 years ago.

solus os (independent ‘semi rolling’) and ultramarine (fedora based) were two other non-debian based ones on my short list. i already have a manjaro desktop so it wasn’t on my list at all… i already knew i didn’t want it on this box.