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which I need, I really don’t have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I’m a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.
Sounds like you want EndeavourOS.
Installs in a few minutes to a fully configured and usable desktop environment of your choice. It is Arch ( uses the same packages, uses the same kernel, has access to the AUR ). A huge benefit of the Arch repos is the up-to-date package universe as well everything you are likely to want being in the repo or AUR.
Don’t underestimate the maintenance and reliability benefits of not having to cobble stuff together from multiple sources.
