What do you consider to be the “Goldilocks” distro? the one that balances ease of install and use, up-to-date, stability, speed, etc… You get the idea.
I’m not a newb, these last few years I’ve lived in the Debian and derivatives side of things, but I’ve used RH, Slackware, Puppy :), and older stuff, like mandrake/mandriva and others. Never tried Suse or Arch, and while Nix looks appealing, I need something to put in production rapidly. I have tried Kinoite in a VM, but I couldn’t install something (which I can’t remember), and that turned me off.
Oh I’m on Mint right now, because lazy, but it’s acting up with a couple of VMs, which I need, I really don’t have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I’m a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.
Installing things on fedora atomic spins is hardly tinkering more than necessary. You either layer the package, install it in a distrobox, use something like homebrew that installs packages outside of /usr, use app images, nix package manager, docker/podman or a flatpak.
These things exist for a reason, because they complement many distros that would be otherwise lacking. They can add a new app to a stable Debian, a stable dev environment to a bleeding edge arch, an isolated environment to use a untrusted app. If you use Linux these days you should be aware of these distribution agnostic options, or you will have issues understanding what is even going on and limit yourself unnecessarily.