This use case begs for arch. Not bloated and up to date upstream and AUR is very robust for the “one off” apps. Rhel on desktop makes sense for development for rhel on servers. Can’t think really of any other use case. At least they could try out centos stream? For all its hate it’s really nice for certain use cases. Although people are religiously against it (rh needs to really work on that before it dies on the vine)

CentOS Stream doesn't significantly change the up-to-date-ness of the packages. It's a few months ahead of RHEL, but RHEL (minor releases) move at the same pace as always, which is to say slowly, so a few months ahead is insignificant.

Fedora is probably better if you want up-to-date packages on a platform that's relatively similar to production.

I run Arch on my homelab, and the AUR is a lifesaver. Not to mention, the basic Arch repos contain more Podman Cockpit modules than apt, to my surprise. Very nice OS for server stuff if you're brave enough to wrangle pacman.

> [Arch is a v]ery nice OS for server stuff if you're brave enough to wrangle pacman.

if you're running a homelab and regularly 'wrangling' a package manager which is broken/incomplete by design, why are you choosing distros based on package availability rather than on the quality of the tooling? surely you can package anything you need to use

I could, but the time I'd spend getting it working on a stable distro vastly outweighs the time I'd spend setting up my pacman.conf and backing it up to git. When I say 'wrangle', I'm more talking about the instability and frequency of updates. It's definitely only for homelab use, I wouldn't ever consider deploying this on a larger scale.

I guess preexisting availability is important when you don't know what you'll want to use, and you're also interested in trying a lot of things that you may not want to keep around for long

Why go all the way to Arch when Fedora is perfectly serviceable? Used it for a few years before being imposed a MBP.

any RHEL user who is happy switching to Arch probably never appreciated what's actualltly good about Red Hat's tooling

I have had luck running Debian Stable with apps from Snap when the older .deb from the repo doesn't cut it. I haven't found that setup at all complicated.