Linux

While I like tinkering, I do want it to be relatively stable, not suprising me with issues when I need it.

I would suggest avoidig pure rolling distros then. Also bear in mind that usually the performance difference between distros is not really big enough to make a difference for most things.

I would consider something like Mint. But what I did on my new laptop was that I installed PopOS 24.04 Alpha and used gnome-session ("sudo apt install gnome-session") on it, though I've switched over to COSMIC now as I'm writing apps for it and it works for my games. It'll get regular kernel+mesa updates but the base os will remain "LTS stable".

You could also go the Fedora (KDE or GNOME spins) route, it has a regular update schedule, this might be a great option for you.

Fedora. It just works. I use it for work and it doesn't let me down. Semi annual upgrading it is easy and it seems to be moving slowly, because gnome/LibreOffice is, to flatpaks. It's slow to change and stable because of it, they still include Grub when it became a relic since systemd included gummyboot (systemd-boot) many years ago.

Contrast that with ArchLinux which is 'cleaner' and a rolling distro which I prefer; Fedora isn't. I use it for a Rescue USB. I used to use it for work but, and this is long ago, I managed to break it quite easily by 'fixing it' too much! ArchLinux doesn't let me down but I don't have a gui or Window manager on it, console only, and I know my way around Linux reasonably well.

Debian is still confused about systemd. Run a combination of testing and unstable branches on the desktop and you've got a great system but this is before the systemd days where they moved all the systemd defaults to the old/odd places that make no sense. As you say, snap appears to be another mad experiment by Ubuntu, like mir when everyone went to wayland.

If you're going to use your PC for games, I think there may be better distros than these. I'm not a gamer so I can't advise.

I'm not a huge fan of derivative distros, like Ubuntu (based on Debian decreasingly) or so on. I'm not one to mess about with screen savers etc and aesthetics though. To me derivatives add bloat and unexpected changes.

Source distros are a rabbit hole I've been down. They were fun but I couldn't get myself to do any work when I had them.

I've never tried SUSE, it's alternative rpm style distro which can be stable as a rolling.

Distrowatch.com is always worth a visit. Find a/several forum that is your intended use and find out which district they use there; if you have issues they'll know how to fix it.

You want stable and no snaps.

Debian

I see people saying CachyOS is finicky, but I've had almost no issues in two years of extensive use.

And anything that pops up gets fixed extremely quickly.

What’s better, everything you need for gaming is in the repos by default and pre-tweaked, no need to fuss with it like other distros. This is my nitpick with Fedora or Arch AUR: once you go outside the curated, officially supported packages, you are asking for trouble.

Cachy - you might have some extra hoops to jump through. The performance difference is negligible for just desktop usage.

PopOS - no real benefit unless you're running Nvidia, and then it's only for the moderately useful graphics switching stuff.

You sound like you want Fedora for simplicity's sake, honestly. There's really no other major performance differences between desktop distros. Any tunings that one has you can just apply to another if you know their benefits.