Linux

Aeon Desktops it is

For me it was Gentoo. I am not sure what it is but for my work it just works better. Tests shows it runs faster for my work and comes with all the tools I need to compile things. I really like the package naming scheme and use flags. I also like the custom-ability of it as well. Tried arch and others but hated it. Also I think the documentation on Gentoo is insanely good.

Fedora. Installer is a bit rubbish (being replaced soon) but it's not difficult.

In terms of speed, stability, and being up-to-date it's been exceptional IMO.

For me, it's Arch for desktop usage. When I first started using Arch it would not have been Arch, but now it's Arch. The package manager has great ergonomics (not great discoverability, but great ergonomics), it's always up to date, I can get a system from USB to sway in ~20 minutes (probably be faster if I used the installer), it's fast because it doesn't enable many things by default, and it's honestly been the most reliable distro I've ever used. I used to use OpenSUSE ~10 years ago, and that broke more in one year than Arch has in ten.

I personally feel like Arch's unreliable nature has been overstated. Arch will give you the rope to hang yourself if you ask for it, but if you just read the emails (or use a helper that displays breaking changes when updating like paru) and merge your pacnews then you'll likely have a rock solid system.

Again, this is all just my opinion. It's easy for me to overlook or forget all of the pain and suffering I likely went through when learning how to Arch. I won't recommend it to you, but I'll happily say how much I've come to enjoy using it.

Fedora. Silverblue if you want even more stability.

@elucubra linux mint was my goldilocks for a while. Had to get through some major driver issues before it was stable but I loved it. Very recently moved to fedora because I wanted the latest updates without being on a edge distro

Slackware.

It. Just. Works.

Fedora. Specifically I've been using Silverblue recently, very stable system for me.

i love my void...

For me atomic distributions are the way to go.

You get a rock solid base system that get updated automatically, and every single user has the same image so you can't get into a bug that's only reproduced on your system because of your combination of system packages. If for any reason you have a problem with an image update, you can always boot on the previous image from grub.

Then user apps come on top of that, and can't break the base system.

I know you tried Kinoite and got stuck, but there is always a way to unblock yourself and install what you want. If it's not in flatpak there is homebrew (for CLI), and if it's in neither there is distrobox. You can also do a rpm-ostree for native packages if all the others fail.

You can also check universal blue, Aurora in particular if you want KDE. It's based on Fedora Silverblue but with an improved out-of-the-box experience.

https://universal-blue.org/

Eh, the way you phrased that I think it’s either fedora or opensuse. The up-to-date criteria basically knocks out everything with a fixed release cycle besides fedora which is pretty bleeding edge since they update certain things like kernel between releases.

Some criteria are non-sensical though imho. Ease of use? Speed? They are all the same, sure pacman works faster than zypper but it’s not like I’m waiting for either, they work in the background while I do stuff. As for ease of use … kde is kde, terminal is terminal. I think you would have to branch into the realm of the BSDs to get real differences there.

Debian is really solid, prefer it over any of its derivatives. You being unable to install something in kinoite is just lack of research on your part, ofc you’re going to have issues with a distro if you don’t know how to perform the most basic stuff. Stay far away from nix if kinoite gave you issues, with nix 90% of your pre-existing Linux knowledge will not only be useless but actively harmful.

Reading between the lines I think opensuse tumbleweed might work for you. Stable, powerful installer, very up to date and most of your pre-existing knowledge should transfer. Fedora is nice but you mentioned the magic word production, I don’t like fast cyclers in production, major version updates are a hassle at the best of times.

Honestly I’m in love with CachyOS (Arch derivative). Not only have they done a bunch of optimization work, but it’s quite stable (for Arch) and has a graphical way to do just about everything- including the install process

I tried ChromeOS today, and while it looks awesome, has some really great UI elements and integrations, I would still say uBlue with KDE Plasma comes close to it.

I would prefer sane atomic updates though, like twice a month. Fedora is not that good in that regard, you want to update every day as you get fixes every day.

Also, OCI images are consuming tons of bandwidth currently, so ostree is still better.

For me that would be Fedora (preferably KDE). I currently am on Aurora (Kinoite fork), but that’s because I value stability very highly (except for immutable and Debian nothing is stable enough).

Debian. I run Stable on servers and Unstable on desktops.
Although I do think OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Arch are actually better in some aspects, I find Tumbleweed too rough around the edges (it's a derivative of Leap and that shows). And I just can't be bothered to install and configure Arch anymore. Fedora and Ubuntu are too buggy on average, Mint is too "stable" for a desktop and I don't use all the helpers that make it newbie-friendly. Slackware suffers from issues that were solved in the Linux world decades ago, and I dislike derivative distros on principle.

I've probably tried around 30-40 distros and I always return to Debian.