What you are looking for here is Debian Sid ;)
The Freshness™ of Gentoo or Arch Linux, but with the Robustness™ of Debian!

To each their own, I suppose.
Both have pros and cons, but Windows 10, even at this moment, is a convoluted mess. We'll see where it goes from here. Most likely not in a good place.
Anyway, use whatever makes you happy, but as I said in a previous comment, do not get stuck with something or in the same place.
You should have a closer look at system32.

Actually, I think the most active post-Mandrivia distro is Mageia.

Gotta join the people saying Fedora and OpenSuse are your ticket. Great software support, and mostly seamless updating from version to version.

Man, after having read the parlance of Space Station 13 for so long, there's just a way that describing Debian as Robust that makes sense.

It is Microsoft's revenge to the humankind, in case we refuse to adopt Windows 10 X and make Bill Gates rich(er than what he already is).


I am joking of course. It is not Bill Gates, but Satya Nadella.

+1 for Fedora (despite it being exactly not what the OP wants)

I use Fedora Cinnamon and although I'm not wedded to Cinnamon and could see changing window managers in the future, I don't see myself changing from Fedora anytime soon. It's stable, secure, up-to-date, and very well supported. Yeah the 13-month support feels a little short sometimes but that is by design. The short lifecycle on Fedora works because the upgrade process is well tested.

To each their own, but please don't choose a Linux distribution based on a window manager. As someone said every major distribution supports every window manager and it is not difficult to install two or three and switch between them at login time.

To each their own, but it's not the fear of upgrade process going wrong that makes me not want to use rolling release/short support. It's the fact that the upgrade is happening in the first place. So even if it was a 100% tested upgrade that happens immediately with a single click I still wouldn't want it. I like my OS not changing and remaining same (except for security updates and the like) for a few years, followed by a complete overhaul, than having tiny changes made to it frequently.

The thing is, for most users, the change from Fedora 33 to Fedora 34 will involve at most, a change in the default wallpaper and a major upgrade to the defacto desktop. The changes are not only proposed, but also publicly available to track the status of.

24 major changes, 31 self contained proposals.

And by changing the 34 to a 35, you can see what's coming next.

I know, but difference between whatever's current in 2015 vs 2020 is going to be same more or less for distro X and distro Y. I'd rather have it happen all at once at discrete intervals than little by little every few months.

Like hummer said: But that 2012 Arch is very different from 2021 Arch. As different as say 2012 Ubuntu vs 2021 Ubuntu. Those small changes took place every new version.

I just have a personal preference for having a major change every couple of years instead.

Right, but what you are proposing is the same sort of software staleness that gives developers headaches via bugs being reported against obsolete versions.

I don't know what version of xscreensaver that Mint is using because their repository search is absolutely broken (good sign), as is the Ubuntu Package Search. Debian Sid however, is shipping 5.45, when the latest stable release is 6.0.

Now 6.0 was released under a week ago, but we can both keep a count of how long it takes for Debian to upload this upstream. And that should reflect on how long it'll take for the backports to reach.

5.36 from the looks of it.

I don't know what to say... I do get your point, but personally I've never had a problem of just downloading the latest version from the developer or compiling from source any software for which I could only find obsolete versions using apt-get. And the few times I reported a bug to the developer, checking if it's been fixed in the latest version is the first step I'd do.

This sounds like Debian stable is what you're looking for, to be honest. Even after new releases, the oldstable branch is generally still supported in some way for a year or two after the new release (and in some cases, even after that). I know earlier in the thread you mentioned having some apprehension about multimedia support, but getting appropriate audio/video libraries, etc, loaded is pretty easy either way, and there's also the deb-multimedia repo if you explicitly want to make things easier.

Others also mentioned KDE Neon which is built upon Ubuntu LTS versions. It's basically the KDE distro, but you'll be seeing more interface changes more often due to KDE being updated on it constantly vs being stuck at a static version.

EDIT: Or just use Kubuntu LTS, for a more non-changing KDE Ubuntu. It's been a while since I looked into it, but IIRC, you can change a Kubuntu install into KDE Neon later on if for whatever reason you wanted to switch.

Okay, that works for you. But not for erryone else. Not everyone wants to download 1.5 GB of devtools just to get OpenRCT2 running because Libduktape isn't included with my distro.