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which I need, I really don’t have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I’m a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.
I tried ChromeOS today, and while it looks awesome, has some really great UI elements and integrations, I would still say uBlue with KDE Plasma comes close to it.
I would prefer sane atomic updates though, like twice a month. Fedora is not that good in that regard, you want to update every day as you get fixes every day.
Also, OCI images are consuming tons of bandwidth currently, so ostree is still better.