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!
I’m a fan of Fedora Silverblue, especially for development. The system updates itself automatically and atomically. Which means your system is identical to the one that the maintainers use for testing. An update simply installs the new version of the OS with its tested changes in total, during the next reboot. So the chances of an update breaking stuff are basically zero.
But you’ll have to wrap your mind around it: All GUI apps are installed as flatpaks. If you want to tinker and customize stuff on the command line, you create a container and work inside that. So you can have as many Linux systems as you want for developing in different environments.
The usual linux way of editing and installing a bunch of command line stuff in your base system is possible by modifying the installed image, but it doesn’t really make sense here.
When I first tried it, I left frustrated cause it seemed to throw hurdles in my way (most of the file system is read only). But after adjusting my workflow, it’s great.
It’s not a distro you’ll adjust to your needs in every detail. It’s just there, it’s default Gnome (There’s the KDE version Kinoite, too) with up-to-date software, and it works. You generally don’t touch the command line on the base system.
For tinkering, you have the containers, as many as you want, with any distro inside that you want.