Arch based distros are easy AF. I’ve been on Linux for 2 years, I’ve tried 10+ distros, and Arch has been the easiest for me, and stable as it gets, while allowing me to get the latest drivers needed for gaming.
I’ve been using Crystal Linux, but got tired of it’s CLI only package helper, and since then I’ve moved to Manjaro KDE.
Whatever you chose, make sure you get automatic BTRFS snapshots, so you can roll back at boot whenever you wreck it.
I’ve read here on Lemmy that NixOS is a great concept but the execution leaves a lot to be desired, stating that it’s overly complicated and documentation is lacking.
If you only care about stability then you should go with Debian. If instead you want something that limits you so that you can’t easily wreck it, you could use an immutable distro like Vanilla OS, Fedora Silverblue, BlendOS or Ubuntu Core Desktop.
devs have to eat too, open source software (when fully free) is sometimes built as a hobby like Jellyfin, or as a portfolio project, or worst case scenario as a bait and switch to paid (sometimes it’s death sentence). Then there are sponsored projects like Vulkan, or others that live off of donations like Mozilla.
Krita has been adding photo manipulation tools faster than GIMP is fixing their UX/UI, so at this point I think Krita will be the first to become the most viable FOSS alternative to Photoshop.
I ended up ripping the HDDs and putting them on my server, then proceeded to share the drives as normal. My docker containers now use them perfectly fine. IDK wtf Synology is doing but it’s cumbersome AF.