I think gitui deserves to be on the list

Is it a switch in gnome sw or settings? If not it’s not pretty easy

It used to be, Snap ootb is remarkably horrible, I had a not-good internet plan and Snap drove me crazy with its updates, I could’ve settled fine if auto updates could be switched off, but nope, they’re shoved down my throat, I’d say Mint is a better starter distro

Endeavor allows you to pick from a number of DEs/WMs on installationa

I guess you could try an immutable distro (Fedora Silverblue comes to mind) if you want something that just works and you don’t want to use it for programming