Take a gender at this*

No, it's a play on words as is.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gander

British politics are funnier anyway.

I’m not sure what a “music jukebox” is, and how it’s different from a music player, but I would recommend to try mpd.

A jukebox lets several people add a song to the playlist and yes, mpd is a solution for that where every event attendant could install a client on their phone.

What I was trying to say was that I’m happy to be free of Microsoft’s ability to just sunset an operating system version that I liked and replace it

I figure you weren't a Gnome user during the 2.x to 3.x transition times.

Nobara is at least under my control in a significant way.

Yes but also Nobara isn't an LTS distribution. Its versions get sunset way sooner than any major release of Windows.

I’m so happy to be able to end my reliance on Microsoft.

Microsoft is a frequent contributor to core Linux technologies these days. Lennart Poettering to Microsoft has probably been the most prominent move but there are others that work on Azure Linux and WSL who also upstream their work.

Now Ubuntu is Ubuntu without the fuss

Ubuntu is a trojan horse for Snap.

If you have cutting edge hardware, this might be an issue.

No, thanks to Valve's efforts for Steam Deck all RDNA2 hardware directly benefits for upstreamed improvements.

Older packages, but not too old, generally provide better stability.

And worse compatibility. Old packages are a no go for upstream supported hardware like Intel's and AMD's.

Fedora simply takes what KDE offers, and the whole VRR etc. additions seem to cause tons of bugs.

Like any other distribution with KDE software.

But being the first to implement KDE releases… is problematic.

That comment makes little sense. Someone has to be the first. It's impossible for everyone to wait. Also waiting forever means that existing users are stuck with old bugs because the update is not coming out. The first Plasma 6.1 update has been released yesterday. Don't think Fedora users will have to wait forever for this.

Btw, Plasma is not the default desktop of Fedora. OP mentioned it but OP also talks about noobs who should stick to defaults anyway and also not make experiments with Atomic editions either.

just that Fedora’s function is typically regression testing for the money making product.

Fedora is not an LTS distribution but Fedora itself has as robust, if not more robust, QA leading up to a release as any other distribution.

there is quite a difference in stability between Fedora and Debian.

Sure but Debian really, REALLY is not a newbie distribution.

requires a fair bit of post-installation configuration (suboptimal OOTB experience for newbies)

I'm not the biggest fan of Gnome's defaults but the regular, non-techie users want a browser (maybe Chrome instead of Firefox, depending on preference) and possibly Steam for gaming. Both are on Flathub, available from Gnome Software.

Less software availability compared to Ubuntu or Mint

The software that isn't available, isn't of interest to newbie/non-techie users.

More likely to break than Ubuntu or Mint

If anything causes breakage, it's those web tutorials telling inexperienced users to add a bunch of PPAs to do shit. "So you use Ubuntu but video playback is a big laggy on your super new, hardly upstream-supported Radeon graphics card? Easy, add this PPA with untested git snapshots of Mesa and Kernel." Yeah, no.