How? How? How is it this fucking close America?
I'm not sure if it's niche but openSUSE Tumbleweed isn't as popular as it deserves to be. If you are looking for more niche, back in my distro hopping days I enjoyed Kaos and Solus
Pussolini
Yes you can but you often see the terminal used when helping people online. This is because it works across desktop environments and mostly across distros, however it does give the impression that the terminal is needed.
Alpine Linux is often recommended in similar circumstances. I've never tried it so can't say how it is. Of course you could use Debian with a light WM.
Konsole. It meets all my needs.
Try openSUSE Tumbleweed
I reckon they looked at their telemetry and chose the setting most people have which has the side effect of being more familiar to Windows refugees.
They take Ubuntu LTS and add their software on top of it. Ubuntu is the base. It's stable because it's unchanging, you only get security and bug fixes, no new versions except the Neon additions. It's implemented like it is because starting with a complete and freely available distro like Ubuntu is a lot less work than building from scratch.
I think it qualifies as a distro by any current definition, but maybe not one they expect to be in general use. It seems to be quite popular despite that. I've never used it though so I can't comment on how it is.
To be honest, I wouldn't on a 2Gb laptop. It'll run Linux just fine but the minute you use a browser or office suite you'll have memory problems.