Linux

Fedora is its own thing, and unless IBM was RHEL to die, they have to keep kicking resources in, because the majority of non-security contributions come downstream from the Fedora community.

i figure, I just want to be ready if something does happen.

Since timely updates are an issue, specifically Debian Testing is a good stable distro.

Legal, hr, finance, and accounting is now IBM, and IBM has noted job cuts as part of the cost savings in its profit forecasting.

Engineering, product, sales, and marketing are not making any changes - yet.

I would note that IBM is also now pushing its "enhanced AI" support over speaking with actual people, unless you have an upgraded support tier. Basic support tier can also no longer escalate cases.

I would agree in not needing to rush anywhere, but I would have to say this looks like the start of enshittification for sure.

I've been using Tumbleweed for years, and it's great.

I'm definitely leaning that way so far, are there any major differences from fedora I need to be aware of?

Or try arch light aka cachyos.

The Arch wiki is useful not matter what distro you're on.

ive tried arch a couple times but I dont really get a lot of the options and its a bit more technical than I'm looking for.

i dont think I have. ive tried leap and tumbleweed or whatever they're called before but I didn't see any reason to use it over fedora at the time.

might have to look at that

I think there are arguments for NixOS for a casual user despite the learning curve reputation. But there are also downsides to consider.

The pros:

• There is a good, user-friendly installer that makes it easy to get a working system
• From what I can see setting up KDE is pretty easy - there are configs online that you can paste into configuration.nix without modification
• NixOS is good for gaming with proprietary drivers and Steam - again it's a matter of pasting a few lines of configuration
• Like with other distros it's easy to recover if something breaks
• Unlike with other immutable distros you get a lot of options for tinkering with your system, and experimenting. You can dip your toes into the advanced stuff, going from casual user to Linux expert at your own pace, with the safety line of being able to roll back changes at any time.
• If you stick to the basics you can have a very stable, very update-to-date system without much difficulty.

The cons:

• To get the full safety of rolling back a previous point in time you need to ditch channels, and instead use pinned nixpkgs revisions. The best way to do that is probably using flakes - but whatever strategy you use you need to depart from the setup the installer gives you, and learn enough to remake your configuration.
• You'll find contradictory instructions depending whether they're written for use of channels or flakes.
• Going beyond the basics of installing packages, and using premade NixOS modules gets you into the infamous learning curve. For example I'm guessing that managing kwin scripts declaratively in Nix config might be an adventure. But managing them by hand the way you do in Fedora might be the same. (I haven't tried this, so I'm not sure.)
• There is some stuff you have to know, like if you want to run binaries that weren't built for Nix you want to set up nix-ld first.
• If you're building software you have to learn to do things the Nix way because of the lack of FHS. That's great for Nix fans like me, but frustrating for some.
• There is no graphical software center, nor automatic updates. You have to use the workflow of installing stuff by editing your config file, and get used to using search.nixos.org to find stuff. This is a pro from the perspective of having a stable system that can be rolled back to earlier states, but might feel less user friendly than a GUI workflow.

Even if you set up flatpak (which is easy to set up tbf) you're probably going to be managing flatpaks using the CLI.

It would be easier for me to recommend NixOS if the installer set up a flake configuration with more niceties pre-installed, like nix-ld. The next best thing would be a de facto standard flake starter configuration for people to copy. But like I said, I think there is a case.

I'd rather just use any distro with Ansible for configuration

Ubuntu's not "cool." Personally I don't care for GNOME or the theming in general. Also snaps are not popular. I do like the Debian base though, so I just use Debian KDE.

I did for quite a while, since it was basically Debian with some extras that I found useful. (The PPA build farm and server, for example.) Then they started forcibly replacing native packages that I used with snaps, which caused me more trouble than I was willing to tolerate, so I switched to Debian Stable.

I still have family members using Ubuntu. I'll probably migrate them to Debian eventually, but there's no hurry, since their needs are pretty basic.

It is either dead or dying

It is still pops up from time to time but isn't what it used to be

I do and find it stable and comfortable, but for most those two things make it boring i suppose :D

I've not been on linux for long, but I like my kubuntu system. Took a bit of fiddling (non standard video drivers, non standard Proton for steam, wayland was buggy on my hardware), but now it's been working a treat for both gaming and productivity.

Judging by the sentiments for Ubuntu on here, I feel like it's unfairly maligned. It seems like everyone wants Linux to be easier to adopt by the masses, but they don't like the distros that fill that niche.