I’m a software developer with plenty of linux experience but I just want a distro that just works without me having to troubleshoot everything all the time. I am lazy and I just want something easy and reliable. I don’t want an update to break it. But I want the ability to customise it if I want to and the ability to install pretty much everything available easily.
Basically I want MacOS, but as Linux. I’m very hopeful that there’s something I have overlooked!
In the past I’ve had issues with Debian having old versions of stuff in the package manager without an easy way to opt in to the newer versions of them. I understand that I’m asking for something that might not even be possible - both stability and the ability to have more cutting edge packages - but I’m happy for example if things are kept at LTS/Stable versions by default but you could opt in to later versions or something like that?
Debian Testing is perhaps the happy medium then. I wondered if the packages in Debian Stable would be a bit too old for you.
You could also install flatpaks or Docker containers for some things.
That’s the whole point. Stability over cutting edge updates - which could potentially break things. The newer the software, the more likely you’re going to be an edge case of something not working as intended. That’s true for any software since it is all a tradeoff. You said you want something very stable, that’s Debian.
Cutting edge software can be partially solved using Flatpak
(If you’re running GNOME also install gnome-software-plugin-flatpak)
Now you can just run the software app and there’s a drop-down on each app’s page where you can select which repo to install from. Flathub will almost always have the latest versions. You could have both versions installed simultaneously if you want. There’s also just generally more packages available on flathub.