Our family runs Debian + gnome on all our desktop clients. The kids love minecraft and java version works perfect for their needs. Wife needs Libreoffice, Brave and printing.

After several years I have landed on Debian with plain old gnome for my whole family. Boring as f***, but it just works. Currently untraining myself from opening my terminal on fresh boot to do pacman -Syu. Flatpacks have solved my need for updated software.

Exactly my idea aswell. Take your time to optimize and strip down your base install, then it’s easy to just clone your base in virt-manager.