Key differences I noticed:
- apt vs dnf
- Intalling on a new computer.
Would totally recommend.
I've had Fedora for over five years and I've never had my laptop get completely borked by an upgrade, but I've had just enough things break between releases in the past that I still get get the sweats every time I've gotta do the restart upgrade, whether it will come up completely and just work or whether my WiFi is now broken because resolve-d changed to systemd-resolved.
Key benefits: - Applications through flatpak don't depend explicitly on system libs so there's less chance of breakage. - If upgrading to new fedora version breaks anything, switching back is just one command away (rpm-ostree rollback). I don't think going back is so easy on normal fedora.
Still undecided though; I'm too old (read; jaded) for distro hopping now, but maybe I'll try find a Debian setup as another commenter suggested that'll work.
I really enjoyed the results of NixOS with flakes but a couple of things were a little more challenging than I have time for to switch it into my daily driver.
It was that steep curve that stopped me going back to date; I liked everything about it, the community was very welcoming and helpful, the declarative nature, and ability to define my machines' states in Git, the documentation, no complaints except the time I'd need to feel as proficient as I am elsewhere.
Not exactly sure what you mean by modern, but I'd recommend debian "unstable" (also called "sid"). Despite its name it's pretty stable. Normal debian stable releases are LTS style, unstable is where newly built packages show up first—so it will generally have the latest version of stuff and not be stuck a year or 2 back. It's basically a rolling-release style thing—I put in a little cron-job that does `aptitude safe-upgrade -y` every night to keep me up-to-date.
You can also use debian "testing", which one step back from "unstable"—packages are promoted from "unstable" to "testing" when if they've gone 2 weeks without a bug report of some particular severity (that I can't remember off the top of my head).
What's nice is you can have both testing and unstable in your apt sources—on my machine I set the priority on my testing higher than unstable so I generally get the testing packages, but I can grab unstable if I need to. I've been running this way for about 20 years now, and it seems the right balance of new but consistent.
I don't want things breaking left, right and centre but I want access to later versions of tools and libraries I'm using.
For example, at work we were told to upgrade Wireshark and VirtualBox to major versions that aren't available in apt on 22.04 after an audit due to vulnerabilities in older versions.
What you're doing sounds like it'll work nicely for me, thanks.
I can't move work off of Ubuntu; it's too embedded now, but I'm looking for something else for home. Switching distro-base isn't so easy when you've been using it for decades though; I tried NixOS but it wasn't comfortable (Nix is a steep learning curve), though their community is top notch, and everything I do is deb based.
Looking for a way to get a modern debian (something akin to non-LTS Ubuntu) or just go all out and switch to something Arch based like EndeavourOS.