KDE Plasma is the best desktop (or you can choose to be wrong)
and then…
if someone is STRONGLY pushing a specific distro/package manager/whatever? Ignore them.
lol. I love it. :P
To OP though, if you really don’t want to “distro-hop”, you definitely should test drive several. Look into Ventoy, it basically makes a bootable flash drive that has a separate folder/partition you can just drop bootable .iso files into, and then on boot Ventoy shows you basically a boot menu that lets you pick any one of the images to boot. If you get a nice and big usb flash drive, you can get basically ALL of the distros you want to try on one bootable usb stick so test driving them requires a lot less time and effort. You won’t get a good idea of performance typically from a live environment, but you get a very good idea for the “look and feel” which will likely help you narrow it down a lot.
and then…
lol. I love it. :P
To OP though, if you really don’t want to “distro-hop”, you definitely should test drive several. Look into Ventoy, it basically makes a bootable flash drive that has a separate folder/partition you can just drop bootable .iso files into, and then on boot Ventoy shows you basically a boot menu that lets you pick any one of the images to boot. If you get a nice and big usb flash drive, you can get basically ALL of the distros you want to try on one bootable usb stick so test driving them requires a lot less time and effort. You won’t get a good idea of performance typically from a live environment, but you get a very good idea for the “look and feel” which will likely help you narrow it down a lot.