For those who haven’t give it a try yet, Fedora 34 was released and look pretty good. Though I can’t get Opera browser to work with it. It freeze after a Minute or two.
You might want to try Gentoo (or one of its variants), Arch (or one of its variants) or Debian (or one of its variants).
If you’re interested in doing what you say, probably Gentoo or a Gentoo-based OS would be best for you. It’s difficult to learn and use but you emphatically would NOT be bored with it! If you don’t want to go through the installation hoops of Gentoo you could try Calculate Linux, one of its offshoots (but take note: Calculate Linux is of Russian origin and its forum is of little use to English-speakers).
Arch and Arch-based distros are also something to consider. In my opinion, the best Arch-derived distro is EndeavourOS - and it’s the best variant by far (again, in my opinion), mostly because of its ease of installation and its straightforwardness in customization. You can install almost any desktop you would like and you can add almost any program you like. Everything just works! You can use it almost exclusively from the command line or you can use GUIs for whatever you wish. You have a great deal of choice with EndeavourOS. In addition, its forum is by far the best Linux distro forum out there!
The above systems are, of course, rolling-release types.
If you want a fixed (Debian-based) release type of OS, then (repeating - it’s my opinion), MX Linux is by far the best of them, both in using it as well as in customizing it. Take a look at it and you’ll see what I mean.
I hope that this has been of some interest to you. Best of luck.
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Hey
Thank you for writing it will help me for sure 
Can’t go wrong with Linux Mint 20.04 XFCE version. I’ve been using it for nearly a year and with the apps that the Linux Mint team have made, a bonus. Snaps are not included, but the other one is and as I’m writing this cannot remember the name of the other one that is as bad or actually even worse than Snap packages, that downloads rubbish that you don’t need. I promised I would not mention this again as I have mentioned in another post my opinions on Snaps and the other Package Manager I still have forgotten the name of.
I’m just typing for the hell of it really now, to see if it’ll come back to my memory, no it hasn’t yet thanks for asking, oh you didn’t ask did you, just in case you did ask I thought I’d add that in too, saves typing it later on. On a serious note though if you need apps just install the Deb versions or the Appimage versions.