I no longer actively fight my package manager because it decides that my kernel needs to be broken at this very moment (looking at you, openSUSE). I don't have to deal with the twiddling that one must do to get a working laptop setup. Drivers just work. Suspend/resume just works out of the box. Best of all, I can get shit done without fighting with the OS.
When I ran Linux as my desktop of choice, I floated between most distros with a pulse, trying out the ecosystem to find something that suited me. RPM, DEB, source, you name it I ran it. I avoided the forks of forks, sticking to mostly popular projects. In doing so, I learned that I really dislike KDE and Gnome, and I'm not too crazy about Xfce. I've tried the minimalistic approach (starting as far back as blackbox days) and something felt not quite right, like there was always something missing, and no amount of fiddling, tweaking or twiddling could rectify it.
I guess my point, if there is a point to this, is that your mileage will vary with Linux. Caveat emptor and all that.