Try NixOS. The killer feature is mixing old and new packages because deps are not globally installed
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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While I like tinkering, I do want it to be relatively stable, not suprising me with issues when I need it.
I would suggest avoidig pure rolling distros then. Also bear in mind that usually the performance difference between distros is not really big enough to make a difference for most things.
I would consider something like Mint. But what I did on my new laptop was that I installed PopOS 24.04 Alpha and used gnome-session ("sudo apt install gnome-session") on it, though I've switched over to COSMIC now as I'm writing apps for it and it works for my games. It'll get regular kernel+mesa updates but the base os will remain "LTS stable".
You could also go the Fedora (KDE or GNOME spins) route, it has a regular update schedule, this might be a great option for you.
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Cachy - you might have some extra hoops to jump through. The performance difference is negligible for just desktop usage.
PopOS - no real benefit unless you're running Nvidia, and then it's only for the moderately useful graphics switching stuff.
You sound like you want Fedora for simplicity's sake, honestly. There's really no other major performance differences between desktop distros. Any tunings that one has you can just apply to another if you know their benefits.
Don't necesssrily care about simplicity because I do plan to tinker a lot, I just dont want too frequent updates that arent thoughly tested, I like the 6months to yearly more than the frequent rolling updates, I do plan on messing with the theming a lot since I do that on windows with rainmeter (something would always break with windows updates for anything else)