Linux

Between linux distros on the same kernel and a similar DE setup the difference in performance between them is within the margin of error. If it's greater than that then something is broken with the setup. You'll likely get worse performance and hardware compatibility on debian or mint, just because they run older kernels by default. You can get newer kernels backported to debian if you add the right repositories, but I don't think it's recommended.

I run the desktop version of bazzite and can not say enough good things about it. It's been more stable than debian for me and the "immutible" distros i've been on have been such a good and trouble-free experience that I don't want to touch traditional distros anymore. It has all the codecs and a bunch of extra hardware support enabled by default, a bunch of scripts to easily set up things, and a bunch of QoL improvements set up on install. Having to open up flatseal every now and then to grant permissions to a flatpak is so much less trouble than what I've experienced on traditional distros where updates can straight up break shit and randomly send you on a troubleshooting goose chase. I don't understand how anyone finds that normal and acceptable. You can get local AI set up pretty easily with the right flatpaks (alpaca) or certain appimages.

If not being able to mess with system level stuff, or the niche quirks of an immutable distro are a dealbreaker, or you want to jump around on different DEs and not mess with a VM: Fedora is good, generally stable and decently updated packages. Mint generally stable but might have slightly older packages. CachyOS for an arch based option that's highly regarded, because it has a lot of useful options, but with rolling release distros the risk of updates causing an issue slightly higher than usual. I've also heard nothing but good things about OpenSuse Tumbleweed which is also rolling release but reportedly very stable.