It’s my choice but Arch and its derivatives look like the trend like CachyOS which is #1 right now on visits on distrowatch. Also I’ve heard Google use Debian as gLinux and I feel many other giants also use it and sponsor it and I’m not comfortable choosing it as my distro. Can the sponsors togethwr with students or any other interested use it for their PCs, either coding or ordinary use? It strictly promotes free but worried about giants and sponsors.
Debian is perfect in particular for work. Stable, free, capable. Hardly more to want. And it’s been almost the only stable bedrock in my tech career of over two decades. I’ve probably made over a million USD with it, while everything else eventually gets taken by a corporation and becomes folly to build on. Free software forever