TLDR: is the amount of time used to switch to these distros worth it? (compared to Debian, Fedora, etc.), or is there a better distro that fits my use case?
I have been using Linux for about 4 years now as my daily driver, distro hopping a lot. I have used PopOS (for a few years), Manjaro, Garuda (for a year or so), KDE Neon, Debian, Linux Mint, Nobara (for some months until I ran into system breaking issues), and lastly EndeavourOS.
Issues I have run into in the past are around the different packaging systems and versioning. The Debian/Fedora based ones seem to be fairly slow to update and so they have out of date packages, which sometimes is ok, but sometimes if they are too out of date I have to compile it from scratch. Also the different packaging systems (like apt, pacman, dnf...) means that depending on what flavor I am currently running there may not be a analogous system or maybe a package will be missing and I end up (once again) having to build it from scratch. On the other side I have Arch Linux based ones, which usually works great (especially having access to the AUR) but I end up spending a lot of time configuring stuff that isn't built in (which is by design I know), or having stuff randomly be broken after an update. (which I suppose is my own fault I should have probably set up btrfs or something). Also some libraries will build/work great out of the box on some distros and be completely unusable on others for no apparent reason.
I looked into Gentoo, NixOS, and Guix SD as possible solutions for my issues. Gentoo because since it seems like I have to compile a lot of my libraries anyways maybe I should use a system where you have to compile everything. NixOS and Guix since it seems they are designed for package management and versioning built into the system which might be exactly what I am looking for.
I am worried about the learning curve of all of these. I don't have a lot of time to mess around with configuring stuff all the time. Ideally I'm looking for a distro that works well with my old-ish hardware (with NVIDIA support unfortunately) where I can sit down, program and/or play games on steam+proton; but it seems like I have to choose between "system is stable but packages are old" and "system and libraries are new but is very unstable. Or if I am using snaps or flatpak its "install 5 things and now you are out of memory" (thanks electron).
Also concerned about both NixOS and Guix since they seem to be designed behind "everything goes through the package manager", which is super cool for making it so the environment is the same, but I am concerned about getting stuff to work if a package doesn't exist or if the library is designed to use like 'pip' or 'bun.sh' or some built in package manager.
Any thoughts about this? any non popular distros that might fit my use case? did I give up on some distro too soon? am I just a confused newb?
As a Gentoo user:
If setup correctly, absolutely.
Otherwise, it's a nightmare.
I'd say in most case, you'd want to pick something simple to get you up and running, as well as to set a baseline.
If it's work related, I wouldn't go anywhere near anything that isn't based on Debian, Ubuntu, or Red Hat.
Gentoo is an open book test on compile flags at all times.
All you have to know is all your system variables, compiler flags that exactly two distros use, init, daemons and hardware and it's great!
On some level I admire the people who know that stuff, but I've had my OS compiled for me for a long time. I loved portage once I figured out how to use it though.
I might add some version of Suse (open or enterprise) to that list though. Last I checked there were a bunch of shops kicking the tires as cent os shut off. Didn't keep up on how that turned out.
Gentoo is surprisingly reliable as personal system. I like how you'd be able to customize stuff compile stuff, making it leaner than most setups.
I've heard a lot of good things about SuSE, but it's mostly from the community and not the enterprise side of things. I've never seen enterprise setup with SuSE, whereas the three I mentioned earlier I've seen all the time.
Zypper is very solid, and I can't say anything bad about suse, but it was 15 years ago I was strictly working off of VMs while the company I was working at advertised support. If there wasn't the Debian social contract I think a lot more projects would have forked it.
They had a better reputation down the company chain than redhat, but the orders always seemed to go to IBM.