There are a ton of people in the nix community that run unstable. Once you have a working NixOS system, its harder to break than you traditional distro, since nix (the package manager) builds and evaluates the update, and if software doesn’t build, your update fails and you stay with your current working system.
I have an overlay for darktable and a few other programs that let me build the latest versions.
Yeah, rolling releases are great. But they will always bite you in the bum eventually. Fairly inefficient as far as using up time and resources as well.
My first proper commitment to an OS was to Gentoo. Well before the drama. Half a decade or more on that. Then Arch, just the same. Really, what I wanted was a minimal distro and the rolling OS just was the way to achieve that. I use a Debian based distro with minimal packages to achieve the same goal.
The idea that you use a rolling OS to keep up with security packages if the whole kaboodle ends up breaking is a false economy. Granted most of my failures have been self-induced at least I only have myself to blame these days.
Question from a Ubuntu only guy: if I want to change (let’s say to Fedora) - can I just save my Home directory , install the new distribution and re-copy the old home directory back - and expect to continue as before? Can I do this even with my steam stuff?
should work if the apps on fedora are at least the same versions or newer.
rolling release distro like openSUSE Tumbleweed + openQA made a huge step forward.
and since your gentoo days we got filesystem snapshot support. which easily allows you to do rollbacks when something goes wrong.
p.s.: I once had a new coworker tell me “Tumbleweed is what I wished gentoo would have been” and yes he was a gentoo contributor before. 
Interesting. What filesystem would you recommend to use today? I assume things have moved forward since my last install on ext4?
our (openSUSE’s) default FS for the rootfs with snapshots is btrfs. but IIRC ext4 had also work in progress. not sure about the state.
TBH i am running Tumbleweed daily for like 15+ years now and the real issues i had were minimal. plus as others mentioned it was a lot faster to get hardware enablement in.
I have used btrfs for years. It is stable for my usage, and it improves with each Linux kernel release. It has many more features than ext4 and, in fact, the developer who leads the ext4 project called ext4 a stopgap until more modern filesystems became available. He now spends a good bit of his time working on the btrfs project.
Let me add recommendation 1001 to this thread. I’ve been using Aurora for six months now on both a laptop and desktop computer with the ability to roll back if an update does not go well. My anxiety level has dropped significantly. I have had a couple instances where I needed to roll back, and it was a godsend.
It took a while to get things set up for my specific needs, but I’ve had a very stable system now for quite a while. Of course, that could change at any moment…
+1 for Aurora , for about ~1 year, no rollbacks needed, dt as flatpak and AppImage, opencl with RTX 2070 working as expected
it should be noted that only nvidia is working with DT and flatpak iirc.
Is Aurora KDE-only, or KDE-centered? It’s description says it is built around Plasma.
you have many immutable base distros now.
openSUSE has Aeon (Gnome) and Kalpa (KDE)
Fedora has multiple spins too.
And if a spin of either distro is missing with your preferred desktop environment, start one.
Why not a single spin that let’s you pick your preferred DE? I haven’t looked much into immutable distros but it seems like a waste to split efforts so much. Are those spins just a configuration of base packages reliant on a base system?
It is not clear to me if you meant to answer my question about Aurora. If yes, I don’t understand your answer and it is still unclear to me if it is Plasma only.
That said, I don’t understand why the choice of desktop environment should be so tightly coupled to the “spin” or whatever as you suggest. It is just a bunch of packages after all. One should be able to install multiple environments, experiment, switch to a different one, etc.
What’s next, a different “spin” for each browser?
the more packages you have in the immutable core image the more reboots you get from updating said immutable image 
and you would probably be annoyed if your machine reboots for a KDE update which you arent even using no?
If the immutable core image needs frequent updates, then reboots, for any reason, I would say that the concept is fundamentally broken.
Frequently rebooting for no good reason is the comparative advantage of Microsoft Windows. I don’t see why FOSS should compete in this area.
you can argue about that sure. but any of those immutable distro has that problem. that’s why you normally have a minimal core image and the rest via flatpak and so on.
Yes of course, this is why I asked 
I didn’t know the whole distro shipped with every package. I thought there was some selection like with nixOs
It’s good practice to reboot after updating your kernel anyway. So unless you run debian or other “slow” distro, reboots are bound to have to happen eventually. The problem with Windows reboots is that they are forced and not selective