nanook

Complete with built-in spyware and censorship.

Personally, I use x2go to graphically access my servers remotely. It redirects X protocol over ssh and it also short circuits many of the X round trips making it much more responsive than bare X-windows. It also supports sound, remote printing, and file transfers.

Hasn't been an issue for me. Perhaps you don't have your system properly configured?

Control-D gives a hex value of 0x04, where as ENTER or CR gives a hex value of 0x0d,
they are not the same. Control D returns the carriage on old tty machines, on many modern linux platforms it is treated as CRLF, that is carriage return and a linefeed. Control-D indicates end of file or end of transmission.

I've had Fedora updates screw up so many times and spent way too many hours fixing mutually conflicting updates that I have really come to loath the OS. I keep a Fedora server running for my customers who are Redrat enthusiasts but Ubuntu is so much better behaved.

I installed 6.14 on servers here and really see a non-trivial boost in efficiency, less CPU sitting in wait state and more executing applications.

Yep, I still use X2go to get a remote graphical display from my machines at the data center while I work on them from home. It also provides sound and remote printing and leverages scp to transfer files.

What do you prefer? Linux allows multiple desktops to be installed. I use Mate primarily but I also have lxde installed as a backup in case something breaks.

Not sure what you're definition of "powerful" is, but this friendica node, https://friendica.eskimo.com/ runs on an I9-10980xe (18 core / 36 thread) clocked at 4.5Ghz with 256GB of RAM, 29TB of raid 1 disk space (three RAID partitions, two nvme1G raided, and two partitions of two 14TB each raided). It runs great with 6.14 kernels. I was less satisfied with the task switching on earlier kernels, it typically runs with around 1000 processes. I run non-preemptive tickless kernels.

Never cared for Zorin's inability to update from one release to another in place. Got way too many apps and custom configuration to re-install every time a new release comes out.

I use alpine when I want a text client, Thunderbird when I want graphical.

For what it's worth, even if you're sticking to a lts release like 24.04, a 6.14 kernel is a very worthwhile thing to do. I found substantial reduction in load average and CPU time wasted in wait state on my busier servers.