1. Chimera Linux

Chimera was developed by q66 in 2021 and now I can call it one of the most convenient distributions that does not blindly follow the mainstream: glibc, systemd, btrfs, flatpak, but looks for its own ways of development. One of the most important improvements is the change of scudo allocator to mimalloc, which allowed to achieve better performance

2. CachyOS

Arch-based distro which use which uses aggressive kernel optimizations, different repositories for different processor generations (x86_64v2, x86_64v3, znver), alternative task schedulers, and has one of the richest desktop environment choices available

3. Fedora Asahi

For the best performance on Apple's chips, the most powerful Arm to date

4. POP_OS!

This prize is rather for the Cosmic desktop environment, which is getting better by the day, and is catching up with mainstream KDE and GNOME in terms of pace of development

In conclusion, this is just my opinion and I don't claim to be true, but I think these are exactly the candidates that deserve more attention right now