With Intel having sunset Clear Linux, when it comes to aggressive out-of-the-box Linux performance there is the Arch Linux based CachyOS as the leading contender. Given the recent releases of Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora Workstation 43, if you are curious about the out-of-the-box performance here are some fresh benchmarks of all three using the Framework Desktop.
No complaints with cachyos, it just works, has solid defaults, I like it over alternatives since I like using the aur repos, but honestly now that ive adjusted to linux, all of what I need could be grabbed through a flathub appstore like bazaar/software, any disto works, the performance gains are marginal, don’t really need to use the terminal at all on cachyos, but even less so on other distros, unless you constantlly finnick/tweak and want to be on arch for that purpose, any distros fine and should work pretty much the same, most like mint are much easier to use and setup, since you never feel the need to use the terminal on those.
I think the biggest benefit of cachyos is actually all the des you can install when launching, easy to reinstall and try all the popular ones.