Debian XFCE or Xubuntu LTS.

xfce is stubbornly slow at introducing new features, but it is absolutely rock-solid. Hell I don't think they've changed their icon set in some 20 years.

Debian and *buntu LTS are also likewise slow feature updaters that focus on stability.

Debian stable is as hassle-free as you'll get.

It sounds like your issue is more with having to migrate to a new laptop. Firstly - buy laptops that are more linux compatible and you'll have fewer niggles like with sound, suspend and drivers.

Secondly - use "dpkg --get-selections" and "--set-selections" to transfer your list of installed software across to your new laptop. Combined with transferring your /home directory, user migration can be speeded up.

Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is my pick.

I've got two study laptops and apart from Tailscale giving me some grief very recently with DNS resolution, I literally haven't had any problems with either machine. Both have been going for 1.5 years.

I like the LMDE route for the DE already having pretty decent defaults and not requiring much tweaking from the get-go. Xfce (as it ships by default in Debian) absolutely works, but I end up spending an hour theming it and adding panel applets and rearranging everything so that it... ends up looking similar to Cinnamon anyway, because default Xfce looks horrible in my opinion

Debian

fedora with gnome for me.

avoid nixos

Peppermint , based on debian (also a devuan flavor). "Everything you need and nothing you don't"

Xubuntu LTS. I've been meaning to switch to Debian Stable when something breaks, but it's my third LTS on the desktop and 5th on the laptop and there was just no opportunity. I also learned to avoid PPAs and other 3rd party repos, and just use appimages when possible.

You can have a kernel from Testing or even Sid, I believe, but yeah, it's what we want to avoid - tweaking.

LTS is released every 2 years, for reference.

My Arch Linux setup on my desktop and my servers are low-maintenance. I do updates on my servers every month or so (unless some security issue was announced, that will be patched right away) and my desktop a few times a week.

Nearly anything can be low-maintenance with the proper care and consideration.

For your constraints I would use just use Debian, Alma Linux or Linux Mint and stick with the official packages, flathub and default configuration on the system level. Those are low-maintenance out of the box in general.

Debian. Unattended upgrades. Maybe flatpaks if your (GUI) stuff isn't on debian

every system is only as stable as the user. anybody can break Debian or any other "stable" distro of renown the second they go tinkering, adding PPAs or anything else

I use pop os. works out of the box.

I use fedora and Ansible to fix things I want to be different all the time. After I install the OS I run Ansible pull and it makes all the changes I want

Get a big mainstream distro and stop tinkering with it.

Desktop:

• Aurora, Bluefin, or Bazzite

Server:

• uCore

Zero maintenance for any of them. Not just low maintenance, but zero.

• yet another vote for Debian Stable
• second the comment on: if you need a newer kernel for hardware reasons, use backports
• Xfce
• stick to flatpaks when dealing with wanting to try out a new program (if you like it, then make the decision to use apt or not)
• don’t confuse “hasn’t been updated” with “hasn’t needed to be updated”

I’ve been distro hopping for decades. I got exhausted with things constantly breaking. I’ve been using mint for the past six months with zero issues. It’s so refreshing that everything just works.

If you like debian and just need a newer kernel you could just add backports to your debian install then install the kernel during the install process.

Debian stable + XFCE for me. Missing newer packages though. I'm interested in what problems you had with Fedora

fedora has been this for myself. maybe tweaking every now and then to fix whatever edge cases I've run into but it's the least painful distro I've used so far

Ubuntu. It's boring but it all works.

I am a longtime fan of Debian Stable, for exactly that reason. I installed the XFCE version using the custom installer about 8 years ago and have had very few issues.

Initially my GPU wasn't well supported so I had to use the installer from Nvidia, forcing me to manually reinstall the driver after every kernel update. That issue has been fixed in recent years so now I can just use the driver from the Debian repos.

I installed the unattended-updates package about 2 years ago and it has been smooth sailing since

The thing with Debian is that yes, it's the most stable distro family, but stable != "just works", especially when talking about a PC and not a server (as a PC is more likely to need additional hardware drivers). Furthermore, when the time comes that you DO want to upgrade Debian to a newer version, it's one of the more painful distros to do so.

I think fedora is a good compromise there. It's unstable compared to RHEL, but it's generally well-vetted and won't cause a serious headache once every few years like Debian.