I'd like to settle on a distro, but none of them seem to click for me. I want stability more than anything, but I also value having the latest updates (I know, kind of incompatible).
I have tested Pop!_Os, Arch Linux, Fedora, Mint and Ubuntu. Arch and Pop being the two that I enjoyed the most and seemed the most stable all along... I am somewhat interested in testing NixOS although the learning curve seems a bit steep and it's holding me back a bit.
What are you using as your daily drive? Would you recommend it to another user? Why? Why not?
I've been using Arch Linux as a daily driver for about two years I believe. As with any other distribution, it depends on the user's preferences, experience and needs, whether or not I'll recommend them Arch.
What I like the most about Arch is the customization from the ground up, the rich, detailed and yet user-friendly Arch Wiki, the AUR (although one shouldn't depend on it too much) and that after the installation everything seems more trouble-free than the distributions I've tried before. Arch almost never broke for me and even then fixing the issues weren't a big problem. It's not as difficult as it is often portrayed.
Nor is it as easy as it is often portrayed. A new user could be comfortable starting with Arch Linux, but it doesn't hurt to have experienced another distribution that is intended to be user-friendly.
Having spent years on Gentoo and done several installs, installing Arch the other day was a wall in the park and felt natural. I had to learn the new tech stack (nmcli, pacman, arch-chroot) but after that it was basically easy mode. You mean I don’t have to define compiler flags and feature flags and I don’t have to wait for it to compile or set up a cross arch compiler farm?