my first install of debian was before it had names. my most recent was last tuesday. i’ve strayed for short stints, but debian is where it’s at. i do have a couple ‘others’ but they are special setups for specific things.

if you like the deb-based system but want to get away from canonical, trixie is ready to rescue you.

western digital was the parent, they bought sandisk in 2016.

last year they spun-off the flash storage business back into a new entity (also) named sandisk, leaving western digital (‘wd’) with only the traditional hdd business.

the spin-off also included wd’s previous sd card line as well as their popular computer ssd products (which are being re-branded by the ‘new’ company).

hope you have your motherboard sourced already. lga1200 mini-itx gonna be a tough one to find reasonably priced, otherwise.

cachy is the current ‘flavour of the day’, apparently.

manjaro is arch-based, with different repositories than ubuntu or debian-based distributions. what it offers via the DE’s software ‘manager’ will likely be a bit different.

i use aptitude whenever i want to take a closer look at recommends and suggested packages in a .deb-based system. it’s been my preferred package manager since it was originally released back around woody (deb 3.0)

for games or a mix of games and applications, i would also consider using proton or similar instead of messing around with wine directly on its own.

i use bottles myself, because i just have a few smaller windows applications to set up and it works well-enough for those.