I’ve literally never heard of Bodhi Linux, but apparently it is a fork of Ubuntu LTS, which will have very outdated packages if that is a concern for you.

AntiX is likewise a fork of Debian Stable, so I suspect it will have the same issue. It also does not use the more standard systemd init system, so finding support could be an issue.

I don’t think that it make sense to start off on such obscure distros. The advantage of a widely-used distro is that there will be forum threads and a much larger network of support to help you learn and debug issues.

I can’t really speak to the security aspects of either X11 or Wayland.

XFCE is probably a good, lightweight DE. Many distros will support it. I believe Linux Mint has an XFCE version by default. I’m sure they will get to Wayland eventually, but it sounds many of the features will not matter to you beyond just a working desktop.

I have never tried it myself, but maybe Debian with XFCE might be more lightweight than Mint? Probably more involved to set up, though, so I would research that a bit more before taking the advice of a rando who has never done that specific distro/DE combination.

How so? I have never found installing yay difficult, and using it is essentially the same as pacman with the addition of aur packages. What issues have you run into?

ClamAV

But on a serious note, no, I have no idea why that would happen.

Linux Mint. Easy to set up, reasonably easy to use, and used by enough people that a quick internet search should probably turn up results of people who have run into similar issues if you ever have a problem.

I second @Hellmo_Luciferrari@lemm.ee 's suggestion of Arch/KDE. I cannot think of a time when I have had to go outside of pacman/yay or setup a custom repo. I don’t use them personally, but the AUR even has -git versions of many packages if I needed to have the absolutely down-to-the-minute latest version of something, but even the official repos are rarely far behind in my experience. Fractional scaling seems to work fine on my 2560x1600 display. VScodium works fine when I tested it, but I do not use it regularly enough to really have a strong opinion on it.

That is a lot of RAM. Only a quad-core processor, but I imagine should still be fine for general-purpose desktop use.

What would you want it to do? Honestly I would call that over-specced for something like a file server and would probably consume a lot of power if left on all the time. Maybe a media server which can use the discrete GPU for video encoding?