Two candidates for my best-discovery-of-the-year prize,

Ptyxis terminal: https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/ptyxis A modern take at a terminal, gtk-4 native, gpu accelerated, container-aware etc that replaced tilix in my setup. And it comes neatly packaged as a flatpak

LogSeq notes: https://github.com/logseq/logseq A different approach to note taking & journal. Very nice looking, rich plugin ecosystem, could use some performance boost but I think they are working on it

Big shootout to flatpak/flathub that for me has finally taken off, I converted all of my regular desktop apps to flatpaks. Went from 3-4 apps last year to ~20 (including Firefox libreoffice, even my terminal app) this year and not looking back. This has made doing a major host SW upgrade almost painless for the first time in 25+ years using Linux desktops.

I am no programmer either, mainly a technical-oriented user, and I made the switch to a linux-only desktop almost 20 years ago. I tried several distros but I keep coming back to ubuntu (in vanilla gnome mode), with it’s closeness to debian and huge library of apps, with it’s massive userbase you get a lot of online community support, and it’s really polished these days. For the last 5-6 years or so I’ve been using “LTS” releases, doing major updates every two years, I found that to be a very reasonable cadence and it gives you great environment stability. The only significant downside I found these days is ubuntu’s insistence in using their (proprietary?) snap desktop container app ecosystem, I personally much prefer flatpaks, and actually I use flatpaks extensively on my ubuntu desktop for SW that needs frequent updating (darktable, logseq, etc)

Did you check logseq? It’s on flathub