Ooh if you’re thinking of trying something new I recommend Alpine. An extremely underrated distro for a DIYer. It’s really lightweight and simple and its packaging system is a breeze to write packages for (for things you’d usually use the AUR for, since there isn’t an equivalant for Alpine AFAIK). Void is also fun I ran that for a year. Keep in mind, I’m only talking fun. For a good distro that will Just Work™, Alpine is fine, but I think Arch wins on that front.
NixOS is a journey and I have the privelage of having two systems, one “Home” system running Arch that I use usually and my “Roaming” system which I run whatever and is what I take to class and stuff because usually I only use it to take notes meaning minimum requirement is “Be able to log into a tty so I can write a text file”. So being able to use that for NixOS has helped a lot, since if something goes wrong, I can just ssh into my “Home” machine to get work done.