For me Fedora Workstation is the best: very stable, very up-to-date packages, a lot of available packages. System tweaking is minimal and is done once after installation: enable RPMFusion, add 3 Gnome extensions and Tweaks, use Nemo and mpv as default apps instead of Gnome ones. I like to have the freshest stuff, so I update Fedora daily, it is all automatic and usually takes a few minutes. Everything works and works reliably. After major releases I wait a few weeks for dust to settle and then upgrade. Usually it goes without any problems. Iāve been using Fedora for the last few years and no other distro I tried comes even close to stability, latest packages and functionality. There is a reason why even Linus (creator of Linux) prefers Fedora.
What follows are my criteria for a practical desktop user, who treats the computer like a tool. It is fine to have other preferences, I understand that people enjoy experimenting, but what I write below is not for them. My idea of a perfect OS setup is that
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I only have to reinstall when I change disks,
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Even then, I can migrate my setup with a minimum a mount of work.
With that in mind:
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The release policy fits your requirements. Eg Arch is a rolling release, Ubuntu/Fedora every 6 months, Debian every years or so. This is a trade-off between having new stuff vs stability. On a desktop, I would aim for one of the 6-month release cycle distros, but it is a personal choice.
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The packaging policy fits your requirements. Eg Debian/Ubuntu does not package everything, but what is packaged gets some level of support, issues are addressed eventually, etc. Arch has a much lower barrier to packaging, but a lot of the stuff is as-is. You can always fill in the gaps with PPAs, Flatpak, or compiling from source, the idea is that you only do this for a few programs, so that you reduce your maintenance burden. Eg I compile Darktable from source, it is trivial and infrequent.
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The installer supports what you want. Installers are simple, the idea is to set up the partitions, and bootstrap the system, you take it from there with the package manager. But not every installer supports each combination, eg ZFS/BTFS etc. Other than this, it is not the job of the installer to set up your desktop. It may do, as a kind of extra, but unless the distro supports this after the fact, what are you going to do when things change, reinstall? Thatās a waste of time. (NB: Arch has installer scripts. There is no point in typing in stuff from setup guides.)
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Extras you need, like declarative reproducibility (NixOS), immutability (atomic whatever). These will severely restrict your choices and involve some inconvenience, so at the moment, only insist on them if you are really sure you need it, not because they sound nice.
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Corollary: avoid niche distros unless you are really sure you need them. Eg Ubuntu has a gazillion āderivativesā because someone liked to have a different default window manager. Probably you can just convert to an Ubuntu installation if they donāt work out with about 5 minutes of work, but why bother with them in the first place?
Bottom line: I would go with a 6 month release, plain vanilla mainstream Linux distro (Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc), unless you have more specific requirements.
If I may add.
https://distrosea.com provides free remote sessions to try out a basic user experience and the various desktops (Gnome, KDE, Budgie, Xfce, etc.) or window managers (i3, sway, openbox, etc.). Any of those can be installed on more or less any distro.
https://www.ventoy.net is probably the easiest way to boot various distros from the same USB disk. Donāt discard a distro if some hardware drivers donāt load properly during live boot, thereās a solution somewhere.
Make a simple hardware and software spreadsheet (ethercalc.net) to keep track of any distros you may give a spin.
Clarify hardware and operability
For image editing this could involve GPU and display drivers, color profiles, calibration tools, tethering tools (gphoto2 f.ex.), graphic tablets and control units (dials, wheels, buttons and so on).
For laptops certain wifi cards are troublesome, same for fans, battery control, touchpad gestures, hibernation and stuff like that.
Clarify software requirements
For image editing this could involve specific camera brand tools (may need https://appdb.winehq.org or a Win/mac VM), certain versions of editors vs. specific GPUās and their CUDA/OpenCL/AMD-stuff status.
Totally!
I commented this earlier today on Brodieās most recent Fedora video (YT):
You should be able to match any hardware config, app and translation/localization requirements in all most widely used distros.
Ask if in doubt, most longtime users are happy to help you along.
Things to look for:
- How large is the team, whatās the history and roadmap, if any, are most commits from a few MVPs?
- Is discord/matrix/whatever mandatory to find answers and help?
- How is the documentation and forum organized and updated?
- How is the vibe, is it a club youād like to join and be a part of? Fediverse posts, YT, r/linux and hackernews chatter might give a clue.
Packages in Fedora are updated continuously, not like in Ubuntu. Thatās an important distinction for me. In Fedora I always have latest packages, in Ubuntu they are stuck in the moment of OS release (except security fixes).
Not exactly, an effort is made to avoid major version upgrades, they explicitly say that
Updates should aim to fix bugs, and not introduce features, particularly when those features would materially affect the user or developer experience. The update rate for any given release should drop off over time, approaching zero near release end-of-life; since updates are primarily bugfixes, fewer and fewer should be needed over time.
This is more or less the same as Ubuntuās policy, called Stable Release Updates, they also add bugfixes, not only security updates.
Again, it is very had to find any significant systematic differences between major mainline Linux distros these days. Fortunately, everyone is doing most things the right way. This is driven by pressure to please enterprise customers (RHEL, Ubuntu Pro), but it trickles down to the free versions.
This is about system level packages to keep OS more stable. End user packages are up-to-date, comparable to Arch.
I switched over to Aurora a bit less than 2 years ago, and am happy to have done so. Both my desktop and laptop are running it, and the amount of stress involved in using Linux has decreased a lot. I also have two computers running Bluefin, and those also are working well. Iāve had a couple instances of a failure to reboot after an upgrade, and I was able to simply choose an earlier version and keep on going. The bugs were quickly discovered and fixed, and I just booted into the newest release.
The ACTUAL most important things when picking a distro:
- How does itās [neo|fast]fetch look?
- How many packages installed by default?
- Is the logo / name based on an anthropomorphized animal, a hat, or a vague concept?
- Was the distro founded on some sort of ax to grind (personal, political, ethical, or based on technology decisions)?
Canāt say that I have ever thought too much about the history. So long as it has a track record suggesting future long life, Iām not too fussed.
How about a file system designed by a murderer? Is ReiserFS still in current use? I donāt think it actually is.
LOL! The classic edge case! The only one! Hopefully!
On a more peaceful r/LinuxDrama note I was on https://www.theregister.com/cse?query=solus+linux for some years when the visionary and technical capable founder (created a distro and a new packaging system) went AWOL with some SSH and hosting keys at his disposal only IIRC.
Fallout took some time but got sorted, the Budgie desktop was forked to good use elsewhere AFAIK.
*oh, another drama twist perhaps for those inclined: Solus Is Back, but Can It Survive Its Troubled Past? - FOSS Force
It was removed at the 6.13 release of the kernel, so I guess it does not see a lot of usage. Reiserās criminal history aside, it is technically superseded by btrfs, which has been the focus for a while.
BTRFS is simply amazing and ideal for 99% of use cases that do not demand something specialized, like ZFS, in exchange for more resource usage. BTRFS is comparatively lightweight. Bonus: you can convert existing ext4 to btrfs. Whatās not to like?
I have used many of them: Red Hat 7.3 (early 2000s, way before Enterprise), Mandrake, Slackware, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch.
I settled with Fedora because I wanted a vanilla Gnome and try out new technologies such as Btrfs and Wayland without too many headaches with configurations and AUR packages. But Arch was fun.
Iām a bit ashamed to say that nowadays I use mostly a MacBook (whose GPU is much more performant in photo editing than my struggling thinkpad). Itās fundamental that my next Linux laptop will have a GPU capable of running LLMs ( and videogamesā¦).
Note that new laptops are mostly equipped with an āNPUā, mostly 8-bit and thus useless for anything else.
RAID 5/6? Some strange options, subvolumes are weird. I use it on single disks, but for more than that it is zfs all the way. 
If only Oracle would offer zfs under a dual license 
For me itās still Debian.
And next Opensuse, it has a build in feature for system snapshots before updates, helped me twice.
Snapper tied to zypper is such a godsend.
I think Opensuse is using BTRFS file system in this case, which is what allows the snapshots. You can use this on other distros aswell. Itās pretty cool to be fair.
I gave up on it all ages ago and ended up sticking with EXT4 and adding a custom clonezilla grub entry to make a partition image with clonezilla.
Yes, snapper creates btrfs snapshots. AFAIK, zypper (the OpenSUSE package manager) is the only one that, by default, ties into it, though.
I was specifically thinking about GPUs, although not in the short term, not with this market.
A few months ago, we got a new manager who loves open-source. Since then, our dev strategy shifted from Microsoft-first to open-source first.
Last week, I finally switched my work dev environment from Windows to Fedora (my distro of choice at home too). Absolutely loving it!