I can recommend a rolling release distro, having the latest and greatest can sometimes give you bugfixes that are critical for your setup. It can also break stuff but nothing a rollback won't fix.

Another reason to prefer rolling release is the upgrade path. For Ubuntu upgrading is just awful when you do any tinkering. I ran Kubuntu 20.04 for a while and because I had some custom package sources installed it wouldn't let me upgrade to 24.04. Nobody could help, and the package manager is awful it doesn't let you trace which packages are blocking the upgrade.

I'm kind of miffed that everyone is recommending mint as a starter distro because as soon as they start looking for guides on how to tinker there is a high chance they are going to make their system un-upgradable.

[–] Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah with Linux if it doesn't work you're often just screwed.

This has been my experience for decades. Even if it works, something will suddenly stop working and I'll have no way to fix it without hours of research and messing around.

With windows, I can fix anything quickly through the GUI. But haven't had to in a very, very long time.

I'm going to look at other options. I want to stick with a distro that is fully supported by my laptop to avoid even more issues. But the options are limited.