i switched from pihole to adguard because adguard is bsd compatible and runs on my opnsense router. for linux, the main benefit of adguard is that it is a self-contained app-image. pihole is a bit of a mess of packages that it installs (if installing on pc rather than a pi) , rather than being part of a distribution’s native ports. upgrading adguard is also trivial.
that arrangement on debian has worked well for me.
i like fedora a lot, but its updates got a little too far ahead for me. So i recently switched to debian 12, and with flatpaks and their more-current mesa components, everything is working on my desktop as well as it was before, especially games on steam (flatpak) and in bottles.
gnome 4 is fine. i come from macs and chromebooks, so a minimalist desktop with an app dock is familiar. KDE, XFDE, etc are too windows-y for me.
For both my home server and desktop I use XFS for root and ZFS (in some variety of raid or mirror) for /home and data storage. Any time I’ve tried btrfs for root (such as default fedora), inevitably it poops the bed. At this point, I stay far away from btrfs.
You know who else is a nonprofit? IKEA.
This is The Way