You tried most of them. You found Arch enjoyable, so I'd stick to that for the Wiki, the community, and flexibility.

NixOS looks interesting too, but nothing beats Arch in terms of having so much software at one-click distance with the almighty AUR.

I have been a Linux user since the Red Hat Halloween release (back in the twentieth century) and have run SUSE, Slackware, Red Hat, Arch, Debian and countless of their forks. Currently I'm settled on Pop!_OS 22.04 NVIDIA for my daily driver laptop with a built-in Nvidia GPU. It is rock solid and can run my three displays, each with a different resolution and refresh rate, without ever missing a beat. For everything else I use Debian and most of my clients run either RHEL or Oracle SEL on their production servers.

TL;DR: Pop!_OS daily driver and Debian for everything else.

I’ve hopped around to a bunch of different distros, but I always return to Debian Stable. I don’t really need the most bleeding-edge packages for my system, due to my use case.

Most of my actual apps are installed via Flatpak, so they’re all pretty recent, while still being on a rock-solid stable distribution.

VanillaOS is pretty neat. It has an immutable (kind of) OS, lets you choose which package formats you want to use (flatpak, snap, appimage, etc) and leverages containers (a la Distrobox) and their package manager Apx to give you seamless access to packages on other distros. It's Ubuntu-based right now but the next release is switching to debian.

To be fair, I don't have much time on it. My daily drivers are a chromebook and a steamdeck, but I did dust off an old laptop just to check it out for a little bit.

U want stability stick to debian, bleeding egde apps? NixOs.

Middle ground? Ubuntu Rolling, u get reasonable up to day updates, and reasonable stability.

And remember, the perfect distro is the one u configure, and personalize for u. The distro is only gonna make ur life easier in making it urs, but that's all, I wasted a lot of time understanding this.

I've been using Garuda (arch derivative) for my home and work PC. It works how I want it to, I like that it has BTRFS as default for the file system, and the AUR is such an amazing resource I miss it whenever I use a different distro.

I have a production server that's using Alma at the moment, but with the RHEL news I'm thinking of switching it over to something else, but I'm not sure what yet. I've been using Ubuntu server for some test servers/projects and I like it better than Alma but it still hasn't given me that "wow" factor I feel with Arch so I'm not sure what I'm going to do there...

I'm using Arch simply because of familiarity and comfort in using it. That and pacman being fast usually helps me make up my mind whenever I try something else. I really hadn't experienced any major breakage in any of the packages in the standard repos, especially if everything is configured correctly. So I don't really have anything to say against Arch's stability.

I also hear good things about Tumbleweed, so that could be an alternative and more complete out-of-box package, but that also highly depends on how comfortable you'll be with openSUSE's way of doing things.

It all boils down to how you prefer to configure and manage your system and its packages, really. Nothing much more than that. As long it does the job, it's usually fine.

Linux mint because it works out of the box and I’ve never had an issue installing it on any device I’ve needed.

Most of my office apps are cloud based so all I need is Firefox to get to work. I can also use the live USB to just do work out of that if push really comes to shove.

i settled on fedora kde a few years ago(altho i recently switched to fedora silverblue kde)
imo a nice middleground.

if you are intrested in immutable distros, i can recommend silverblue (not as drastic of a change compared to nixos)

if you are intrested in nixos package management, you might want to try out the nix package manager on your current distro.

an intresting way to get the fresh but stable system you want is to,
install some rock solid distro like debian,
and then use the nix package manager and/or flatpacks to get the fresh software you want.

openSuse. After my years of distro hopping ended over a decade ago I settled on openSuse Leap and never switched to something else again. It's reliable and gives me the least bullshit. And by now it's the one I have the most experience in.

//edit
Leap on my server and tumbleweed on my work laptop but Leap would be sufficient there, too.

In general, Ubuntu is my go-to when I just want something that works and is reasonably stable. Just pick the spin with the Desktop Environment that you like. I'm using KDE Neon (I realize Neon isn't an Ubuntu flavor or spin) on my daily driver laptop, and Ubuntu MATE on my desktop. I also have an old netbook that usually gets Xubuntu, but currently has Fedora 37 XFCE as an experiment.

It sure is nice that we have to option to distro-hop, either on bare metal or in a VM.

Fedora Workstation is what I use for my desktop. If I were to have to reinstall now I'd do Silverblue.

For my home lab I do Proxmox with a couple of VM's for Ubuntu server for pihole DNS servers and an OpenMediaVault VM for my docker workloads. I'd probably do CoreOS or IoT if I was starting over there though.

mint
it "just works" and I dont have to update it constantly

but my daily driver is endeavourOS

Gentoo and Debian. Debian will let you get back to what you really want to be doing whereas gentoo gives you excellent granularity over everything, but can be overwhelming and time consuming.

Really should ask yourself what you'll be mostly doing and pick a tool (distro) that let's you accomplish that.

Gentoo, for its user choice and lack of bloat. I've been using it for a long time, and can create my own packages for personal use if I don't mind them looking like Frankenstein bodges, so that's another plus. It's stable enough if you stick with actual stable-marked packages and don't go out of your way to shoot yourself in the foot, and if something does go wrong at the distro's end, 1. they usually fix it pretty fast and 2. rolling packages back is easy if the older version is still in the tree (and usually still possible if it isn't, although it can get kind of involved).

Would I recommend Gentoo to another user? That depends on which user. You kind of have to be either knowledgeable or willing to learn—it isn't a "just works" distro, although some things have been streamlined in recent years. You do have to put a little time into maintenance, but it's usually on the order of less than half an hour a week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGVXJ-TIv3Y

Immutable OS with flatpak, snap or appimage.

While there is still lot limitation using only flatpak, snap or appimage, i believe that in the next decade they will slowly grow and end up that packaging nightmare.

So we can have an OS up to date, latest app without worrying any breakage. But i'm not well versed and dunno if people and dev will follow that road.

I think it's time to ditch apt, dnf, rpm, aur. I imagine it would ease dev work but i'm not sure.

To me, Debian is almost perfect.

I agree, but ever since systemD, well...

If you are looking for stability with latest updates, then Gentoo. But I won't recommend it to a distro hopper.

Besides than Arch and Mint are my general recommendation.

Arch because I like simple.

Other distros are an exercise in patience I think. Each Ubuntu version has different names and versions of stuff like docker, mysql and everything else. It's really annoying to work with. I assume all six month distros are like that. And you have to add extra repos, keys and whatnot for it to even find things.

With arch, since it's rolling, I just install the latest version and I already know the command. It's always the same. Always.

There are many reasons I like arch but the simplicity of the installations is one of my favorite reasons to use it.

Debian -- The Universal Operating System

Because it's universal, runs on everything rock solid and stable.

I semi-regularly distro-hop, but Xubuntu is the distro I keep coming back to between hops to take a break or when one goes (temporarily) dormant. It's currently running on my primary server/linux machine.

Reasons:
1.) It's light on resources
2.) It's very simple and clean.
3.) It works with all the programs I use regularly; only one needs to be hand-compiled (but that one has to be compiled for literally any Linux machine).
4.) I know it. Scrub/partition/install/configure in under an hour. I can pick up any of my projects again immediately where I left off.