Debian repos is few versions behind the scenes in Hollywood movies in striped pyjamas Golden Balls.

Well he said two commands, not lines :)

I am using uGet with aria2c. Working great for years. I also supports capturing links from browsers via extension for both chromium based and firebox browsers.

I would suggest go with LMDE. It is based on Debian 12 with latest Cinnamon DE. It would be resemble with Windows 90% of the time.

Go with Fedora or Ubuntu (non-LTS version).

After switching to Linux I use uget and tried xdm for sometime. Would be nice to try something new!