I'm thinking something Arch or Fedora based. Any last minute suggestions before I spend my weekend screaming at my terminal emulator?
Fedora >>> Arch in this scenario. By leaps and bounds, if I may be so bold.
Here’s how I’m interpreting your post: you want the latest and greatest software, some degree of chaos to fuck around with, and you’re not necessarily too concerned about distinction between fixed and rolling releases.
Arch is many things, I’ve used it before, but it’s a
massive ball ache to get up and running. Even with the reintroduction of
archinstall, you still need to do the work to get X11, a desktop environment, Firefox, and insert applications here up and running. That’s not even getting into its rolling release nature. Breakages are rare, but they do happen and it’s really easy to get too comfortable,
pacman -Syu, and suddenly you’re at a text prompt when rebooting because you didn’t check the Arch home page for news, didn’t skulk the forums for signs of trouble, and all that painfully boring but still necessary stuff.
Fedora, on the other hand, is about as close as you can reasonably get to rolling while still maintaining a fixed release cycle. New releases come out every 6 months, you’re normally able to stick around on a specific release for roughly a year before you must upgrade, and the upgrade process is surprisingly easy. You’re dropped into GNOME, KDE, or any of the other spin environments like Xfce, Cinnamon, etc, you have a modest amount of pre-installed software at your disposal, and away you go.
Unlike Arch, the Red Hat/Fedora ecosystem requires you to enable
extra repositories for all the fun (re: proprietary or otherwise open-source but still problematic to redistribute by default) stuff, but Arch is a much smaller project with nowhere near as many eyes on it as the Fedora/Red Hat ecosystem. It doesn’t quite do everything for you out of the box like Baby’s First Linux
(ie Ubuntu, Mint, and derivatives), but you’re about 80% of the way there post-install, and all you need to do is put in just a
touch more legwork.
Additional context: Since the Fedora Project is stewarded by Red Hat, do bear in mind that Fedora’s priorities tend to lean toward enterprise features and constant innovation for innovation’s sake. Wayland tends to be default on the GNOME/KDE editions and has been for years, systemd was implemented in Fedora first before radiating outward to other distributions in the early 2010s, and they’ve done tons of other shit before all of that. Back when Java was still proprietary and OpenJDK/OpenJRE didn’t exist yet, Fedora pioneered GCJ (GNU Compiler for Java) so that Linux users could technically make use of Java in some small fashion.
