I’d like to settle on a distro, but none of them seem to click for me. I want stability more than anything, but I also value having the latest updates (I know, kind of incompatible).
I have tested Pop!_Os, Arch Linux, Fedora, Mint and Ubuntu. Arch and Pop being the two that I enjoyed the most and seemed the most stable all along… I am somewhat interested in testing NixOS although the learning curve seems a bit steep and it’s holding me back a bit.
What are you using as your daily drive? Would you recommend it to another user? Why? Why not?
Anything Arch, because it’s hard, it’s a pain in the ass and as an intermediate user I need Arch to break on me so I can fix it and learn.
While Arch does allow a user to do a lot, including breaking their system, I would note that it’s not a herculean task to build and run a stable machine. I broke my Arch system a few times by going against best-practices and it did teach me about some risks, but I knew exactly what I did and why it broke every time. It taught me how to quickly recover, which is good to know for any OS.
I’d call myself an intermediate enthusiast and I don’t have a career that uses Linux, but I have never found Arch “hard”. It just takes some reading and a little patience. The Arch Wiki has a majority of the answers, but if you have tried and failed to find the answer you need, the community is extremely savvy and are there to help you. They just prefer you to dig into the wiki and try for yourself before asking for help.