I have never understood why so many people think installing Ubuntu is a good idea. It's not like there is any shortage of absolutely outstanding distributions. Debian, Arch, Nix, Suse, Fedora, Gentoo -- something for everyone, none habitually weird.
After having tried most (major) distros available over and over again, I decided about 2 years ago that I will just stick with Ubuntu in the future. Why is that?
- Stuff just works (better). No matter which hardware I used, Ubuntu was always the best out of the box configuration. I am getting to old to spend 2 days on setting up an obscure printer driver on arch e.g. These days I just want to be able to print as soon as I boot the first time and use my time for better things.
- It's polished. It just has the best desktop experience of all distros. The fonts look good. The theme does not look like a mess of things jumbled together.
- Most software is available in the repos or you can download a .deb package or use PPAs. The rest I can as usual just build myself.
The only "downside" for me is that it is not a rolling release.
I removed snap after a very short time because I hate it's while also. It's easy to get around the requirement for snap by repackaging them in .deb packages. Just install the snap a vm, find apt packages that provide the deps you need (examine the snap, use ldd/strace). Once they're added to the DEBIAN/control, build. If specific versions are required and aren't available in apt, bundle them and set an LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Use strace if shit still doesn't work). I'm probably not gonna bother updating those apps very often.
I like the Ubuntu UI. I have customized shortcuts a lot but I like the current gnome.
I am still undecided about snaps. I have only a few installed and I am glad they were available as snaps (emacs 27 e.g.).
Not sure what you mean with search.
Fedora is pretty solid but also very much on the experimental side, like shipping Wayland as a default versions ago when half of the applications didn't work right.
I've defaulted to Ubuntu because it 'just works', every other distro I just have to spend time to do what Ubuntu does anyway.