I don’t mind adding forks to the list, or distros based on other distros, as long as the distro they’re based on is a community distro and not a corporate distro. Like you point out though, there aren’t a lot of those.

I used to use Mandrake back in the day. Those Mandrake descendants, as long as they’re actively being maintained, could be interesting.

But how many of those meet the criteria of not being based on corporate distros and are also user friendly? For instance, I wouldn’t exactly classify Gentoo as user friendly.

I’ll be honest. WarGames. I’m a big fan of 80s movies, but when I saw WarGames, it was very much meh.

My first experience with the Fediverse was Mastodon, and my second was PeerTube. Having interconnectedness between the different platforms, like Mastodon and Lemmy, is interesting, but also a little confusing with how it all works, so I just use the individual platforms directly instead.

The way I would handle things is first I would look for a native Linux version, and if that wasn’t available, then I’d try to use Wine / Proton, and if it didn’t work that way either, then I’d look at streaming it through a service like GeForce Now. It would be easiest to have a separate drive with Windows on it but now that Microsoft is turning Windows into ad-filled spyware more than ever before, especially with Windows 11, I’d rather use one of the above options instead.

I’d even be tempted to get a Mac Mini to handle the software that wouldn’t work with one of the above options rather than use Windows.

You might be looking for a KDE desktop. Many of Windows’s better more modern desktop features are copied from it, and KDE is very customizable out of the box without needing to install a bunch of extensions like you do with Gnome. KDE can be customized to fit many different desktop paradigms, with the default being like Windows 10.