Any recommendations for a distro?
I've used Mint in the past, loved it until I spent a day trying to get scanner drivers to work. Don't know if that's changed now, was 4 years ago
cachyos is a good os that is also performant. arch though so there are quirks around the rolling update model but you always have the newestish packages and if you update regularly there seems to be less headache.
Today I'd recommend CachyOS. While I haven't connected a scanner, everything else I've tried just seems to work.
Simple, Debian with i3-wm
You're going to get everyone's opinion here. Try a bunch of the major ones and see what works best. I did this and landed on Fedora but ymmv
Omarchy is pretty streamlined for developers and you can play games as well as they work well.
the Universal Blue project has got a great suite of distributions:
Yes, Mint for most people.
I am using Fedora on machines with new hardware and liking it as well. It has small pluses/minuses vs Mint.