Re: Yes. Hit meet nail head
I'd say try OpenSuse Tumbleweed. The installer is beautiful, it will let you select all the software *you* need in a distro (including DE - KDE / Gnome / Xfce / etc). Zypper (the package manager), and YaST (the GUI for using it) will inform you of any potential issues of installing something, and present you with choices of what to do, and the likely consequences of those choices.
The real beauty though is the BTRFS filesystem and Snapper tool to accompany it. Each time your system changes (installing software / updates, etc) you will automatically be able to roll your system back to before that, and it keeps a history of each change. So if you have a little tinker, and it doesn't work out, reboot, select that read-only snapshot, and boot. Then one simple command will take you back in time (sudo snapper rollback) . So something you tinkered with today doesn't work because of something you tinkered with last weekend - select last weekends snapshot, and you're away. Your documents / files / etc aren't removed if they were created after that point (and there are no multi-Gb 'snapshots' created), but the filesystem is journaled so it can keep track of what state the system has been in since you installed it (default keeps 100 snapshots before the oldest is deleted).
It's on the 'bleeding-edge' of the Linux world, but it's fast, stable, and so easy to roll back an update / install / tinker if something regresses / fails. It takes the fear of borking your OS away, and leaves you free to learn / tinker to your hearts content.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
