The past couple days I've been playing around with some distros to see how they are.
OpenBSD is on hold due to kernel panic which will get addressed, but in the meantime I am taking a look at Linux for fun since I have USB flash drives as well as an external USB drive. This means I don't need to set up a dual-boot if I don't want to, I can just install directly to the external drive from a flash drive and select it from the bios to boot from.
Easy enough to burn isos to a usb flash drive. On windows you can use the Rufus tool (I use this the most) but a lot of people use Balena Etcher instead, which I have also tried.
Played around with some KDE and Gnome distros as well as the underlying families they're from. There has been improvement in the past 5 years. This is observable for example, KDE Neon is a strange one because it uses rolling-release for the KDE portion but the base is Ubuntu LTS, so 18.04 in this case along with the kernel. Compared to Manjaro KDE which uses the Arch Linux base (kernel 5.6+) etc one can observe the Ubuntu base isn't all that ideal compared to the Arch base. I noticed this as well with PopOs! (this is a nice Gnome distro) which uses Ubuntu as a base.
So my plan is, I want to see how OpenBSD is on my computer (I can't start X, just the command line right now) and for Linux I am thinking Ubuntu and it's derivatives are probably to be avoided and it might be something to do with compilation flags, so one thing I might test is to install Gentoo and/or Arch and evaluate from there. Gentoo is also the base for things like Chromebooks.
KDE, Gnome and WMs are also factors in play here because if they are compositing managers, they will affect how things appear so it is not enough to only select a base OS.