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.
DistroWatch isn’t an OS ranking system, its a “How many hits” or " “how many recent users claimed to use” a certain system.
This has no real correlation to actual deployed OS in the world.
It’s more of a buzz ranking; like a lot of people went to Debian recently because of Canonical being a less disrable OS builder. So Distrowatch got a ton of Debian searches at the beginning of that switch, but probably way less now.