I personally solved this by switching to antergos (which is based on arch, but fully usable out of the box). Been running the same installation without any problems for about 5 years now, completely updated irregularly.

Using "stable" distros makes little sense for other than complete newbies and enterprise-like critical usage and such imo. If you don't need bleeding edge stuff they are a good choice though, but for average users modern rolling releases are definitely stable enough.

The freedom is there.

Bleeding edge is development branch of some app like canary builds of chrome.

New version of Gimp available for all windows users at day one after release is not bleeding edge - it's just normal new release.

Meaning of "bleeding edge" and "stable" became strangely twisted in linux community.

New version of browser is not bleeding edge - it just normal life cycle of modern software (year 2019).

I've been eyeing antergos. Any hardware problems along the way?

I've been using Antergos for years now. It's a great way to get Arch on a machine.

I just replaced my GPU today. I ran `sudo pacman -S nvidia`, rebooted, and I was good to go.

As an aside: Arch isn't as "bleeding edge" as some people would have you believe. They have a testing repository, so packages get vetted before making it into the main package repositories. They often wait for a point-release of some software (like Gnome Shell) to help ensure that only stable versions make it in.

Plus, the Arch wiki is the most useful Linux resource I've found. I reference it even when I'm using an Ubuntu machine.

Hardware support is pretty solid, since the kernel, like all packages, is fairly up to date. There's also an option to install proprietary GPU drivers out of the box. And when reinstalling an old ThinkPad, it was also the only distro among the few I had handy that actually came with the correct Intel wifi firmware so I could, you know, install. Two thumbs up for Antergos.

Antergos is not a standalone distro though. Its just an installer for Arch.

nope but install of antergos is always borked in some way. Its actually faster to install arch linux from the command line and fairly easy anyway.

> Freedom of updating and installing newer versions of software without waiting for maintainer/distro half of year to build new package (outdated next week because it's STABLE package).

You have this freedom. It is known as "compiling from sources". In fact GNU/Linux is the only big OS/ecosystem where you have this freedom.

But like all other freedoms, you have to work hard for it.

This same freedom as mining ore for car - virtual thing. You actually can go to another side of universe (as far as light cone allows).

On windows you just can download the same program and use it without any compiling. And you can freely downgrade it if you want to. No compiling, no messing with repos, makeinstall, and randomly corrupted system.

The flatpak on flathub is 18.12.2, which appears to be the latest version.

I don't think you realize how much freedom Linux has. You can absolutely install anything you want at any rate you want with Linux. As soon as that new version of Gimp is out just go build it from source if it is not in the repos for your version of Linux yet. Seeing other comments you have made it really just seems like you want easy over freedom.

> Freedom of updating and installing newer versions of software without waiting for maintainer

Then use Arch, or some other rolling release distro.

> Hope snaps/flatpack/appimage solve this problem in future

These are terrible solutions, not least due to the theming issue. Rolling release is the real solution.

MacOS model is real solution. Like really.

Windows + chocolatey or macos + brew (cask) is better than any repository with dependencies on linux.

Also, do not want Arch or any <distro-name> - I just want LINUX (or Desktop Linux).

One predictable system, instead of many kinds/variants of basically the same programs - one system to hate, one system to deal with. (Arch wiki is good though)

> Also, do not want Arch or any <distro-name> - I just want LINUX (or Desktop Linux).

What do you mean ? How can you have Linux without using a distro ? Are you saying there should be one official distro instead of many ?

If you don't want to worry about distros just use Ubuntu. Argue amongst yourselves about with distro is "best" but Ubuntu has become a de-facto standard by this point, especially if you don't care about "Linux" and just want something that works.

[Awaits inevitable flood of comments along the lines of "I tried x on Ubuntu and it didn't work but it worked fine on y"]

I think he means he wants Linux to be like macOS or Windows where this is ONLY one distro. Which to each their own, but that misses the point of Linux and (s)he should probably stick to macOS or Windows.

> but that misses the point of Linux

Linux is kernel - I talk about good alternative for macOS/Windows, alternative desktop system, that can do much better than other two.

Well, at this point it's very complicated.

And this is why I think snap/flatpack/etc model ("system" in system) is real solution for linux desktop.

Valve's Steam client already achieved same thing: provided one "sdk" for apps, one runtime (that developer can rely on) - because you can't have one main linux organisation like microsoft and apple.

The problem is that there is no 'base system' for the Linux kernel to attach to, the implementations vary widely. If one of the core BSDs were widely adopted, the practise of developers building binaries as they do for Windows and macOS would be more feasible.

Use Gentoo to mix versions any way you want.

easily solved by using rolling distros instead. Use Solus, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Arch and you are set with the latest packages.