What do you consider to be the “Goldilocks” distro? the one that balances ease of install and use, up-to-date, stability, speed, etc… You get the idea.
I’m not a newb, these last few years I’ve lived in the Debian and derivatives side of things, but I’ve used RH, Slackware, Puppy :), and older stuff, like mandrake/mandriva and others. Never tried Suse or Arch, and while Nix looks appealing, I need something to put in production rapidly. I have tried Kinoite in a VM, but I couldn’t install something (which I can’t remember), and that turned me off.
Oh I’m on Mint right now, because lazy, but it’s acting up with a couple of VMs, which I need, I really don’t have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I’m a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.
Eh, the way you phrased that I think it’s either fedora or opensuse. The up-to-date criteria basically knocks out everything with a fixed release cycle besides fedora which is pretty bleeding edge since they update certain things like kernel between releases.
Some criteria are non-sensical though imho. Ease of use? Speed? They are all the same, sure pacman works faster than zypper but it’s not like I’m waiting for either, they work in the background while I do stuff. As for ease of use … kde is kde, terminal is terminal. I think you would have to branch into the realm of the BSDs to get real differences there.
Debian is really solid, prefer it over any of its derivatives. You being unable to install something in kinoite is just lack of research on your part, ofc you’re going to have issues with a distro if you don’t know how to perform the most basic stuff. Stay far away from nix if kinoite gave you issues, with nix 90% of your pre-existing Linux knowledge will not only be useless but actively harmful.
Reading between the lines I think opensuse tumbleweed might work for you. Stable, powerful installer, very up to date and most of your pre-existing knowledge should transfer. Fedora is nice but you mentioned the magic word production, I don’t like fast cyclers in production, major version updates are a hassle at the best of times.
I really like the idea of Nix, but the fact that the learning curve is so high and the skillset isn’t really transferable keeps me away. Also, you can make your own declarative build using BlueBuild, the template provided by Universal Blue, Vanilla OS, etc., so its unique use case isn’t so unique anymore.
OFC, That’s what I implied in my post. That I don’t want to tinker more than necessary. I’ve been doing Linux things since the 90s, installing from diskettes, spending hours and hours on the CLI, compiling shit on a 40Mhz 486… Right now I want something that mainly just works, mainly being the key word here. I don’t mind doing the odd tweak here and there, I just don’t want the tweaking to be a main feature.
Installing things on fedora atomic spins is hardly tinkering more than necessary. You either layer the package, install it in a distrobox, use something like homebrew that installs packages outside of /usr, use app images, nix package manager, docker/podman or a flatpak.
These things exist for a reason, because they complement many distros that would be otherwise lacking. They can add a new app to a stable Debian, a stable dev environment to a bleeding edge arch, an isolated environment to use a untrusted app. If you use Linux these days you should be aware of these distribution agnostic options, or you will have issues understanding what is even going on and limit yourself unnecessarily.