Hi, I was here and asked about a few distros already, so here's a quick summary of my situation:
I'm thinking about what distro to put onto my new Laptop, which will be used for University, Work, and just general daily usage. I am currently using EndeavourOS on my main PC and have been decently satisfied, but I want to experiment more. I've already asked if Arch was fine for this situation, to which the answer was a general "Yes, but keep x in mind" and I've asked about NixOS, where the answer was generally a no.
I've been looking around a bit more, and now I'm kind of curious about Fedora, specifically the KDE spin (or i3, I haven't quite decided). It seems to be cutting edge, compared to Arch's (and by extension EndeavourOS's) bleeding edge, and I'm wondering what you all think of it. From what I can gather it has basically all traits which people used to enjoy in Ubuntu, before Canonical dropped the ball on that. While it's not rolling release, the stability improvements and user experience compared to something like Arch, or even a more comfortable fork like EndeavourOS, seem quite decent, but in your experience, does that make up for the lack of the AUR and reduced applicability of the Arch Wiki?
I'm curious to hear about your experiences and recommendations!
Edit: I feel like I need to clarify, I know about the difference between EndeavourOS and Arch, I mostly just brought it up as a note that I am somewhat familiar with arch-based systems, and as a question of if it'd be stupid to just go with raw Arch, as EndeavourOS is basically the same, but with a more comfortable installer. I should have specified that more clearly in the first place, my apologies.
Controversial opinion: unless your university studies and work is in OS development, then you should go for Windows or Mac. You won't have energy or time to keep fixing your laptop OS when an update breaks the Bluetooth driver or whatever when you have a class to attend and assignments to do
While not choosing a bleeding edge distro is a good idea, there are plenty of stable Linux distros to choose from. And it's not like Windows is a paragon of stability either. And buying a Mac is a whole other story.
I agree with this in general, but you still may want to consider using Windows or Mac if there's university only software that is Windows/Mac-based and doesn't play nicely with VMs, which is really common in test-taking software (since it's essentially spyware). An alternative would be dual-booting if you want to deal with that.
The reason I say this is that when I went back to school and started course work, there was an online class that mandated the use of certain test-taking software. I tried to get it to work in a VM (by masking the clues of being in a VM), and it kept shutting me down. I ultimately had to borrow a friend's laptop to take all of my quizzes and tests, which was a real pain. Thankfully, I only had that one class like that, but any others would have driven me to get a cheap throw-away Windows-only box.
In the end, I'd stay away from bleeding-edge for school work, so Fedora is probably your better bet, but there may come a time that you will need to use Windows (much to your chagrin).