Fedora's key selling point is being up to date and extremely boring. It's mainly just off-the-shelf software, with minimal niche custom software. Flathub and Steam are available from the setup process. It's the most Linux Linux that Linuxes today.

Edit: the bonus is that Red Hat being a sponsor means that the biggest improvements to the Linux desktop come to Fedora first. That's what happened with PipeWire.

Try Linux Mint (or LMDE).

Your comment is almost exactly the text for "why you should use fedora". Not as bleeding edge as arch, not as behind as debian. A great balance.

I’m on Tumbleweed, just regular. It works fine. There are hiccups on occasion, typically NVidia screwing up their drivers.

Tumbleweed has snapper however, letting you roll back upgrades with just a couple button presses. Takes less than five minutes.

I highly recommend it.

If Bazzite appeals to you except for the gaming orientation, look into the Fedora UniversalBlue spins.

I run Cachyos (KDE), for 9 months now. It's Arch based. I have had only one problem that I caused myself because I didn't read the docs well enough. Other than that I have had zero issues and it just works.

It's the best distro I've used (previously ran very early Ubuntu, the SuSe for a while, then Mint).

Linux Mint is a good choice but it doesn't come with a GNOME flavour by default. You can install it yourself if you want, though.

I moved to Fedora after leaving Ubuntu. Worked fine for me, but you'll have to re-train your muscle memory for some terminal commands. sudo apt install becomes sudo dnf install and rpm is a little different from dpkg. Other than that, with the Dash to Dock extension, Fedora feels exactly the same as Ubuntu to me.

bazzite is not just for gaming

it's brilliant for everything

I had the same way of thinking you do when I switched. I eventually landed on LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) because it just worked. Debian itself was too old to do some gaming stuff I wanted and Arch is too bleeding edge for my taste and amount of free time I have to throw at it.

LMDE gives you the rock solid experience with just enough updates to have an easy time with updates or occasional tinkering

Ubuntu is fine. Fair warning if you do go the debian route, upgrading from one Debian stable version to the next is not as easy as an Ubuntu distro-upgrade. But OTOH the Ubuntu upgrades are probably the riskiest part of ubuntu too.

try FreeBSD, then Mint.

I normally use NixOS but recently tried out PikaOS on one of my machines and I love it. Sure it's got a gaming focus but it's fast. damn fast. makes my dev work a breeze. It feels like one of the most complete Linux distros I've ever used. takes all of 15min to install and you can be up and running with everything you need within 30min. And their Pikman package manager is one of the best I've ever used. has distrobox built into it so if I want to install something from Arch, or the AUR, or Fedora, or whatever I just do "pikman --aur install whatever" spins up a distrobox, automatically exports it, good to go. Also has one of the fastest startups I've ever experienced that it felt like I wasn't on systemd. Like Void runit start up speed.

If there are people who want something like Bazzite or Nobara but want a lot more flexibility for packages than PikaOS is it.

Bazzite has a couple of non-gaming sisters: Bluefin (gnome) and Aurora (KDE). Like Tumbleweed they're immutable so you can't mess with the stuff they keeps it running which is why it just works.

I wish there were a Linux equivalent for what the Windows world had before Windows 7 went EOL, where you could have an older, stable base OS that was mostly forward-compatible with newer software.

You can sort of achieve this with Debian Stable and Flatpak, but it's not as seamless as the forward compatibility old versions of Windows had.

Try NixOS. If you can make it work for you then you will never go back. Learning curve is pretty steep though.