> Linux gets a bad reputation because 20-ish years ago Ubuntu sent out free CDs and became the dominant OS.

I've been an Ubuntu user for 20 years, and RedHat and Suse prior to that. Ubuntu just worked. Debian had packages for everything, including from 3rd party vendors. It lets me focus on my work, and not worry about the OS, or compiling packages, or finding installers. When I had issues (rare), the large user base meant that someone had already figured out a solution to the problem.

The flavor of Linux doesn't matter so much in my opinion.

Debian stable isn’t that much more version locked than CentOS or RHEL. Debian also has the Testing tier, which is semi-rolling. Or you could use Unstable. Or if you’re brave, you could use Nightly.

Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS, and others with Debian as an upstream are not Debian. They build their own packages on their own schedules.

Fedora is not “consumer grade RedHat”. It’s the rolling release upstream of RHEL, much like Debian Testing is upstream of Debian Stable.

The main reason Linux got a bad reputation was the tribalism of people going off half-cocked talking about their personal preferences without actually working with the alternatives and starting this sort of holy war diatribe.

i've made my entire career digging deep into linux - i've been what some people would call a "power user" for about 25 years, and a professional for 15. i spent over a decade distrohopping, tweaking, tinkering and customizing every distro from Corel to Mandrake to Mandriva to Debian to Slackware to Ubuntu to Gentoo to Arch to Void, and everything in between, plus the BSDs. i've been a sysadmin, network admin, devops engineer, yadda yadda yadda.

i have never once successfully installed fedora. probably just hardware stuff, but as often as i've wanted to try it and opensuse, they have never booted post-install for me. on machines i've successfully installed Debian and openBSD. go figure. i know i'm an outlier here. maybe it's just bad luck.

but reading your post, it sounds like a club i don't want to be a part of. linux is linux. distros don't matter. you can get nearly anything to work if you spend enough time on it. GUI OS installers that fail are not worth my time.

Fedora Silverblue it's better and Cosmic Desktop looks good for a DE in every release (upcoming 44). For some isolated and rollbackable option, your only options are Silverblue and Guix for the hard way. If you use Nonguix for Guix, on your own, but I'd only use a nonfree kernel in an emergency (the wireless adapter somehow gets broken and the alternative is to boot the OS with propietary fw in order to buy a new one). And in that case I would blacklist every propietary fw except for the wireless ones.

And, yes, I have an overlaid Linux-Libre kernel in SilverBlue.