Another good alternative could be openSUSE: https://www.opensuse.org/ - also pretty smooth, with user-friendly configuration tools, and no snap nonsense. WSL users might also be interested in using that for their distro instead of Ubuntu.
I am wondering why it isn't more popular. Is there any sentiment/experience people would like to share about this distro?
However, the licensing agreement with Microsoft put many people in the open source community off, so I think that's contributed to its decline among hobby users.