Fedora. I’ve been using it since Fedora Core 1 and was mostly RedHat before that. I don’t have time to muck around with my desktop and Fedora almost always just works. I’ve had too many problems with Ubuntu and Suse and friends. And while I like Arch and Debian and others, I just want my desktop to be point and click. My days off tinkering on my desktop are long gone. Kids, house, work, wife, grandkids, other hobbies keep me busy. I save tinkering for my selfhosting adventures.

You should also be able to disable the repo from within the Software store app

If you have another USB drive, I think you should be able to load the wifi drivers from that when using the netinstall. I am pretty sure I remember doing that 15 years ago.

Gnome because it is the default in my district, works right out of the box and I’m too old to fart around with customizing things anymore.

I just want to get to work.