Lots of developers seem to love NixOS, I think I'm with you in not having been able to set it up exactly how I wanted. Silverblue is definitely on the 'play with' list.
I use Alpine for containers (LXC usually, sometimes Docker). Super tiny, very very minimal. apk add <package> and you're golden. PostmarketOS even gets basically Alpine working on things like Pinephones, which is fun to play with.
I had forgotten about Pipewire, an incredible project. Fedora is a great OS, I had always thought RH had more claws into Fedora than they seemingly do. Nice to know it's community managed.
Silverblue is something I need to sit down and play with properly. Arch makes sense for gaming and development, with the packages being so hot off the production line. Is Silverblue your more daily driver 'needs to be stable' OS?
I do agree with you, Debian is amazingly mature and an incredible software project in general. By all means, play with snaps and see how you feel about them. It's also worth looking at Flatpaks (which I do prefer over snaps).
What has been your history with Linux and operating systems?
I think I accidentally opened reddit once, trying to get an answer from a google search. I'm done with Reddit.
It’s Ubuntu in particular that I’m in the process of moving away from. It’s not an easy decision to make as I’ve been using Ubuntu since 10.10, over a decade ago.
It’s becoming a very very opinionated distribution and I just don’t agree with their opinions. Snaps are poor, Mir wasn’t great (especially when it became clear that Wayland was the future) and it seems like the future is just going to be more of the same.
With moving away from Ubuntu, I decided to go down the red hat path. Since doing that, IBM bought out Red Hat and started doing IBM things… so I’m not sure I’ll persist. Maybe Debian, I’m already familiar with it although with that, there’s not much to learn.
Windows 11 for gaming PC, Windows 10 for work laptop, Mac OS for personal laptop and Fedora for my old laptop. Also using both Ubuntu and Rocky Linux for servers. Steam Deck is still on Steam OS, Pi's use Raspberry Pi OS (aka raspbian). I don't really have a 'main' computer as it mostly depends where I am and what I'm doing.
I'm pretty comfortable with any OS at this point, even on mobile devices (both Android and iOS/iPad OS). I'm not a big fan of Windows but it pays the bills working in IT. I was in the process of migrating servers away from Ubuntu and onto Rocky (rip CentOS) although with the recent changes in Red Hat Land... We'll see how the rest of the migration progresses.
Whilst I’m somewhat sad to be here (Reddit has eaten up a significant portion of my time over the past 10+ years), I’m happy to be learning new things and exploring a new way of doing things.
I use virtual hosts frequently with Apache, it's definitely a good way to go.