Linux for Leftists

Honestly, you make good points. I was in the mood for "argue about silly nonsense til blue in face" when I replied to you, but, yeah, the thing about Linux distros is that there's a different best one for different use cases.

If we're talking favourite distro of all time conceptually, antiX, hands down. If we're talking daily driver I actually use, I like Linux Mint for that. Basic, yeah, but it Just Works and that's what I want and need. Honestly, I think I'm a lot like you - I like Debian derivatives, I don't have a good usecase for vanilla Debian though, but I'm not going to tell anyone preferring distros with a different base that they're wrong or get all sectarian about it, that's a waste of both our time and spoons at best and actively counterproductive at worst.

I do find the world of Official State Distros used/maintained by governments interesting from a political standpoint, especially in AES contexts, software sovereignty this, saving taxpayer resources that, yada yada yada, but I've never actually tried using any and don't have strong opinions on any of the actual state distros in question. Except Red Star, my opinion on that one is that "it's garbage and the versions we have here in the West are horribly out of date, don't use it."