First, an integral distaste for everything remotely associated with Ubuntu, on a principle as well as on a stability and usability front. As I mentioned, the best balance between stability and cutting edge tech is on Fedora and other Fedora based distros. No other come close to that balance. See some people mention DNF, but for me that's just another packager, could not care less.

As for the atomic versions that I see many mention regularly, I'm giving them a try, even have bazzite running on my laptop right now trying to see if I can actually like it, but it's not looking promising. Atomic versions I've tried seem to be slower than regular distros for boot an apps launch (work fast enough after, though). Then there's the fact that, while they are great for "fire and forget", that same feature makes them very convoluted to achieve some system level stuff,reqyiring morework and tinkering than with a regular distro.