Try Debian with KDE. Trixie has Plasma 6.

It’s the magic smoke that makes your computer work.
The original full logo has a lamp that the smoke is coming out of, like a genie.

Oh dang, that is really similar.

I’m a teapot

Some people are gonna go to New Londo first.
And that’s hilarious.

Serious question, why aren’t flakes enabled by default

Pop! at the OS

Means “I leave this as an exercise for the reader to figure out”

I’d say Debian with KDE would perfectly fit your use case and level of experience.

It’s a “compatibility layer”.
Wine tricks Windows programs into thinking they’re running in Windows.
It sets up a fake C: drive and intercepts requests for built-in Windows features with Linux equivalents that are wearing Groucho Marx glasses and T-shirts that say NORMAL WINDOWS FEATURE.

It’s Star Trek written by true Star Trek nerds.

That’s pretty good.
I’m gonna piggyback your analogy:

Ubuntu is like an aftermarket car company that put in their own engine. They’ve started putting locks onto things, and when you ask them to install certain options, they say “yes, here you go” but secretly put in a worse version of that thing that only they can fix.
Then you take it to a shop and say “please fix this part, it’s one of these” and they say “that’s clearly not what’s in here, you’re on your own”.

KDE and Gnome are like different consoles and steering wheel, if you could bring those with you into your next car. If you’re used to where the buttons and knobs are, you have the option to bring the whole thing over into a different car.

I don’t think you can just QED your way out of that one

There’s no reason to choose Ubuntu over Debian these days, and plenty of reasons to use Debian over Ubuntu.
For context, Ubuntu is based on Debian, so most of the stuff under the hood is the same, but Ubuntu keeps forcing background decisions about things that are not always in the user’s best interests.
As for user interface, if you’re used to Ubuntu with Gnome, try Debian with Gnome. If Ubuntu with KDE, try Debian with KDE. That way you get a familiar desktop environment and a sensible base OS.

If your only two options are hostile or silent, let’s go with silent.

Terrible timing. Just like the WonderSwan.

I miss Zip Disks. Those things were so cool and so outclassed by perpendicular progress.

It was probably from before Debian included the non-free firmware in the installation media, so you had to scramble to put those on a floppy disk or something, all while your system was out of commission.

You can jump to 25.10 for the short-term release, and there’s a preview available for 26.04 (officially releases in April), both of which have Wayland by default in Plasma and I believe Gnome.
Though I would strongly recommend you try Debian, version 13 (Trixie) includes Plasma 6 and of course Wayland by default.
It’s a bright future.

They did. It’s Wayland. Everything should work in Wayland now. It’s the default for everything, even xfce (4.20+), and x compatibility is handled by xwayland.