I’ve tried basically every mainstream-ish distro there is, I just want some outside opinions because I’m bad at picking stuff and I want to stick with something for a while

Also Linux Mint is quite boring imo

I would give it another look if you can. The wiki is very detailed and it is quite simple to install a desktop environment like KDE or Gnome if you just follow the steps.

I recently switched to Alpine and after seeing how amazing it is I feel like it deserves more recognition in the Desktop Linux space