Mint has managed to become a meme and that's no bad thing, per se, but it can look a bit odd to the cognoscenti. Anyone doing research by search engine looking to escape MS towards Linux will find Mint as the outstanding suggestion.

That's just the way it is at the moment: Mint is the gateway to Linux. Embrace that fact and you are on the way to enlightenment.

I am the MD of a small IT company in the UK. I've run Gentoo and then Arch on my daily drivers for around 25 years. The rest of my company insist on Windows or Apples. Obviously, I was never going to entice anyone over with Gentoo or even Arch, although my wife rocks Arch on her laptop but I manage that and she doesn't care what I call Facebook and email.

We are now at an inflection point - MS are shuffling everyone over to Azure with increasing desperation: Outlook/Exchange and MS Office will be severely off prem. by around 2026. So if you are going to move towards the light, now is a good time to get your arse in gear.

I now have Kubuntu on my work desktop and laptop. You get secure boot out of the box, along with full disc encryption and you can also run a full endpoint suite (ESET for us). That scores a series of ticks on the Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation and that is required in my world.

AD etc: CID - https://cid-doc.github.io/ pretty nifty. I've defined the equivalent of Windows drive letters as mounts under home, eg: ~/H: - that works really well.

Email - Gnome Evolution with EWS. Just works. Used it for years.

Office - Libre Office. I used to teach people how to use spreadsheets, word processors, databases and so on. LO is fine. Anyone attempting to tell me that LO can't deal with ... something ... often gets ... educated. All software has bugs - fine, we can deal with that. I recently showed someone how decimal alignment works. I also had to explain that it is standard and not a feature of LO.

For my company the year of Linux on the desktop has to be 2025 (with options on 2026). I have two employees who insist on it now and I have to cobble together something that will do the trick. I get one attempt at it and I've been doing application integration and systems and all that stuff for quite a while.

Linux has so much to give as an ecosystem but we do need to tick some boxes to go properly mainstream on the desktop and that needs to happen sooner rather than later.

Good for you.

I learned a really strange (yet rather obvious in hindsight) lesson a week or so ago. I recently deployed Apache Guacamole at work for webby access to an RDP box with MFA. We are dumping MS's RDG because it is not very flexible and is really complicated. One of my younger members of staff uses it whilst in the office and are almost pathetically grateful for me setting up the Guacamole thing 8) (WTF).

She's an Apple aficionado. She can now use her Apple thingie as St Jobs intended and also connect to work stuff, which is largely Windows and Linux based but the Linux stuff is abstracted away to the browser.

The key point is that she considers herself as an Apple person for want of a better word and can be an Apple whilst using our corp MS and Linux gear and it appears to her that it is all integrated.

I'm 53 years old and have been doing IT for around 30 years. We really have to get to grips with how people think and work.

mead

Do you really drink a honey based brew?

There is almost certainly a binary version of gcc in Gentoo. I ran Gentoo for 20 odd years and also generally insisted on compiling everything. I recall gcc going from v3 to 4. My laptop ran for over a week on a glass table with a prop to keep the fan vent unobstructed.

I probably should have learned back then that I didn't really understand exactly how the toolchain worked and how to get from ebuilds to binary code really works. I'm a sysadmin and not a programmer.

With hindsight, I suggest that you pick your fights with care. Use the bin versions of entire packages where available and enjoy the flexibility of USE when it will make a difference.

gcc is not the biggest lump you will compile but it does take a while. It was rather slower 20 years ago.

My wife uses Arch (actually). She calls it the internet, when she really means Facebook. She knows it isn't Apple but it gets a bit vague after that!

The last time I had to fire up the Mesh Central client to sort something out on her desktop from work was around three months ago. Every couple of weeks I ssh into it, update it and schedule a reboot for 03:00.

Errm, Wireshark. Please bear with me.

Wireshark is a shining example of an open source project completely and utterly crapping on the closed source competition. As a result we all benefit. I recall spending a lot of someone else's money on buying a sort of ruggedized laptop with two ethernet ports to do the job back in the day.

Nowdays, I can run up a tcpdump session on a firewall remotely with some carefully chosen timings and filters and download it to my PC and analyse it with Wireshark.

OK, all so convenient but is it any use?

Say you have a VoIP issue of some sort. The PCAP from tcpdump that you pass to Wireshark can analyse it to the nth degree. Wireshark knows all about SIP and RTP (and IAX) and you can even play back the voice streams or have them graphed so you can see what is wrong or whatever. That's just VoIP, it has loads of other dissectors and decorators built in.

So what?

The UK (for example) will be dispensing with boring old, but reliable, POTS (Plain Old Telephony System) by 2025. Our entire copper telephony and things like RedCare (defunct soon) will go away.

We are swapping out circuit switching for packet switching. To be fair, a lot of the backend is already TCP/UDP/IP that is shielded away from us proles. When SoGEA (Single Order Generic Ethernet Access) really kicks in then the old school electric end to end connection will be lost in favour of packet switching, which never fails (honest guv).

If you are an IT bod of any sort, you really should be conversant with Wireshark.

I've spent over 25 years with Linux. With multiple distros and a lot of that with Gentoo and Arch. At work I specify Ubuntu or Debian, for simplicity and stability. I always used to use the minimal Ubuntu, because it was tiny with no frills. For quite a few years I managed a fleet of Gentoo systems across multiple customers - with Puppet. Those have quietly gone away. I've dallied with SuSE (all varieties), Mandrake, Mandriva, RedHat, Slackware, Yggdrassil and more.

Arch is surprisingly stable and being a rolling job there are no big jumps. When I replace one of our laptops, I simply clone the old one to it and crack on. I used to do the same with Gentoo - my Gentoo laptops went from an OpenRC job with dual Nokia N95 ppp connections around 2007 to through to around 2018 with systemd and decent wifi when I switched to Arch to allow the burns on my lap to heal. I still have a Gentoo VM running (amongst friends) on the esxi in my attic.

It was installed in 2006 according to some of the kernel config files. I left it for way too long and had to use git to make Portage advance forwards in time and fix around a decade of neglect. It would have been too easy to wipe and start again. It took about a fortnight to sort out. At one point I even fixed an issue following a forum post I made myself years ago.

Anyway, Arch is pretty stable.

Did anyone really think that making UEFI systems the equivalent of a mini OS was a good idea

UEFI and Secure Boot were pushed forcibly by MS. That's why FAT32 is the ESP filesystem.

If I had to guess, a brief was drafted at MS to improve on BIOS, which is pretty shit, it has to be said. It was probably engineering led and not an embrace, extinguish thing. A budget and dev team and a crack team of lawyers would have been whistled up and given a couple of years to deliver. The other usual suspects (Intel and co) would be strong armed in to take whatever was produced and off we trot. No doubt the best and brightest would have been employed but they only had a couple of years and they were only a few people.

UEFI and its flaws are testament to the sheer arrogance of a huge company that thinks it can put a man on the moon with a Clapham omnibus style budget and approach. Management identify a snag and say "fiat" (let it be). Well it was and is and it has a few problems.

The fundamental problem with UEFI is it was largely designed by one team. The wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI is hilarious in describing it as open. Yes it is open ... per se ... provided you decide that FAT32 (patent encumbered) is a suitable file system for the foundations of an open standard.

I love open, me.

No. Those tools are tried and well tested. Yes there may still be bugs lurking but simply rewriting in Rust does not guarantee safety. I do hope that this: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html doesn't get used in that repo.

That said, I'll take a look in say five years and see how they are getting on.

I do IT security for a living. It is quite complicated but not unrealistic for you to DIY.

Do a risk assessment first off - how important is your data to you and a hostile someone else? Outputs from the risk assessment might be fixing up backups first. Think about which data might be attractive to someone else and what you do not want to lose. Your photos are probably irreplaceable and your password spreadsheet should probably be a Keepass database. This is personal stuff, work out what is important.

After you've thought about what is important, then you start to look at technologies.

Decide how you need to access your data, when off site. I'll give you a clue: VPN always until you feel proficient to expose your services directly on the internet. IPSEC or OpenVPN or whatevs.

After sorting all that out, why not look into monitoring?

Me too. I just ran time tree across my home directory a few times. Native console (ie C-A-F3) - 54 seconds, Konsole - eight seconds.

Waveterm is still installing (Arch AUR). The fan has a Gentooesque sound to it as a suspiciously complicated thing gets built. Oh God ... electon ... terminal shaking ... golang ... fans whining ... lap melting ..... the Old Ones are stirring.

The deps for this thing are many. " I watched Firefox builds on Gentoo glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate". OK, its now arrived and my laptop case is making ping noises as it cools.

It takes 10 seconds or so to start up. Look pretty. Accept license agreement (wtf). Now what? Hmm lets try typing in that box. OK. time tree. Go back to Lemmy to type the last two paras of this comment, get bored and uninstall waveterm.

I use Linux (Arch actually) as my daily driver - I'm the MD of a small IT business in the UK. I have at least one employee who is asking me to create a Linux standard deployment to replace Windows because they don't like it anymore - W11 is quite divisive.

For a corp laptop/desktop you might need Exchange email - so that might be Evolution with EWS. You'll want "drive letters" - Samba, Winbind and perhaps autofs. You'll need an office suite - Libre Office works fine. There's this too: https://cid-doc.github.io/ for more MS integration - if that's your bag.

I often see people getting whizzed up about whether LO can compete with MSO. I wrote a finite (yes, finite) capacity scheduler for a factory in MS Excel, back in 1995/6 - it involved a lot of VBA and a mass of checksums etc. I used to teach word processing and DTP (Quark, Word, Ventura and others). LO cuts it. It gets on my nerves when I'm told that LO isn't capable by someone who is incapable of fixing a widow or orphan or for whom leading and kerning are incomprehensible.

My phone is on 23. Nextcloud is on 27.

I'm Arch and so is my wife (actually) and it doesn't have a version. We just roll ... and today my dongled, wireless mouse has stopped moving. The buttons still work and my laptop touchpad works fine.

wtf!

Files are files and filesystems are filesystems. You keep your files on filesystems.

NTFS and ext4 are non convertible - you cannot turn one into the other directly, in place. However you can take files from one and put them on another.

Yes, moving TBs does take time, sorry it is unbearable.

Never used Flatpak or Snap in nearly 30 years of using Linux. I might one day but not yet.

I don't use Fedora these days but your package manager will probably have some hooks. Add one to update your Flatpaks when it has finished its main job.

It's been around for a very long time. It used to be Gentoo based.

"I’ve been considering installing Arch the traditional way, on my X220, as a way to force myself to improve."

I use Arch and so does my wife (she has no idea). The wiki is legendary because it is well used (I've written a few bits myself). I've used Gentoo for quite a while too but you will find compilation times a bit of a bore.

I own an IT company - I am the MD. I use Arch actually! (and so does my wife)

"I understand that Canonical has every right to make the decision about their product."

That seems fair. There are loads of distros available so why not try something else if you don't like Ubuntu?

Linux and other mainstream Unices such as FreeBSD or OpenBSD int al (that's not something I ever thought I'd be able to say a few decades back) are not Windows or Apples or whatevs. You do you and not them!

If Ubuntu fails to scratch your itch then move on. Debian is the upstream for Ubuntu so you'll probably be fine with that instead. There is loads of documentation for Debian via the wiki etc and of course most Ubuntu docs will apply as well.

They will if enough people whine about it.

In the old days (I'm 50+) tumbleweed drifted through ~/ apart from my drivel and I'd have a folder for that so /home/gerdesj/docs was the root of my stuff. I also had ~/tmp/ for not important stuff. I don't have too much imagination and ~/ was pretty clean. I was aware of dot files and there were a shit load of them but I didn't see them unless I wanted to.

This really isn't the most important issue ever but it would be nice if apps dumped their shit in a consistently logical way. XDG is the standard.

USE please.

Each to their own.

I find it amazing that so many distros with volunteers manage to curate a vast software ecosystem, reasonably successfully and yet some of the largest companies on the planet, worth more than $1T each cannot manage to find the resources to do it efficiently.

Imagine firing up a cmd or ps prompt in Windows and tying in: msiexec install adobe-hipster-app and it just works.

So you "make config" once and then you just tweak it from time to time! I used to run make config until I discovered xconfig (when X was xfree86) and settled on menuconfig.

I was still using menuconfig on Gentoo until around five years ago. OK I still have one or two Larry's lying around doing useful stuff but generally I just copy the old kernel config to the new one and compile away with genkernel.

make config did take a while back in the day. You literally run through the entire kernel's options one by one: y/n/m for drivers. I haven't done that since 2.0.x days. Then you forget to sort out lilo and reach for the boot floppy. No I don't miss those days.

Define stable! Both are non rolling distros so that means that you have the upgrade jolt every few years. I have several VMs that started off life as Ubuntu LTS around 16 so from 2016 and are still running but now on 2022.04. Those are servers so relatively simple - web, PHP, Samba, DBs, etc. PHP is a pain to fix up. Ubuntu doesn't have the rather neat slotting feature that Gentoo has so you get to do quite a lot of detective work to put it back together again. Debian is similar - again I have several systems that I manage that have gone through at least three or four Toy Story names.

Arch is rolling so there is no break and continue point. There have been some packages that have broken or been broken but not the entire system and that suits me. The QA is surprisingly good from the devs. Arch really isn't the bugbear, nightmare super ricer thingie that it is sometimes painted out to be. I find it a very thoughtfully put together distro with an awful lot of moving parts that are well integrated and a great toolset. Choice is paramount and delivered in spades without the micro management that Gentoo requires.

It also helps that I have been doing this stuff for well over two decades so some challenges are no longer the challenge they once were.

A scan performed by the researchers found that 77 percent of SSH servers exposed to the Internet support at least one of the vulnerable encryption modes, while 57 percent of them list a vulnerable encryption mode as the preferred choice.

That means a client could negotiate one or the other on more than half of all internets exposed openssh daemons.

I haven't got too whizzed up over this, yet, because I have no ssh daemons exposed without a VPN outer wrapper. However it does look nasty.

Employer here (UK)! I'm probably not normal being the MD and running Arch (actually) on my gear. I had to switch from Gentoo because I kept on burning myself.

For me, something like the LFCSA is something I respect because it is practical. Back in the day I did something similar (Novell I think). I've also grabbed a VMware ... whatever ... and that was a memory test and a waste of money. Who cares if you can quote the maximums?

When I'm hiring, I want to see application and knowledge and not a plethora of industry "quali-wankery"! You can always search for facts but knowing how to apply them is what I want to see.

Be flexible but do try to develop what sort of direction you want to take. What floats your boat out of dev ops, sysadmin etc?

You could also consider self employment/consultancy. I sort of fell into it 23 years ago ...

How should someone who expresses an opinion - that receives downvotes - request feedback?

I run an awful lot of MS email for a lot of customers. My own company (literally mine) uses Exchange on prem and I pass all access through HA Proxy. My customers mostly use M365 but one is still on GroupWise (I have known GroupWise for roughly 25 years)

I've seen browsers come and go. My first one was telnet on a VAX through a X.25 PAD and a string of connections via the US (I'm UK) to CERN. First graphical browser was Mosaic on Win 95. I think Mosaic became Internet Explorer - MS don't really innovate - they buy it.

Edge is basically Chromium with knobs on. Chromium is Chrome with knobs removed (sort of!) I can exclusively reveal that Firefox works fine with all version of OWA and Exchange on-line, because that is what I personally use and so do many of my staff and customers.

If you have snags with your uni email then there is something specific there and not your browser choice. Edge doesn't do anything special for OWA it's just yet another Google browser.

The Fediverse is rather different. I'm sure there will develop some sort of sign posting system to point out where to go but by its very nature, it will be subjective. Perhaps some sort of vivacity score could be used to judge how alive a community is and some way to show all communities across all instances in a say top 10 listing. In time communities with the same broad focus will develop a particular or set of focuses (foci, focae - not for me). Time will tell.

Lemmy is different to the walled gardens and it needs to mature and develop its own way of doing things. I love the fact that the largest instance went down with a bang for a while and the rest carried on fine. I feel for lemmy.world residents and admins - I'm a sysadmin myself. However that demonstrates the sheer power of the fediverse. I will be spinning up an instance eventually, once I've got the hang of using it and I run some quite important stuff at work.

Tools and memes will develop over time but make no mistake, the fediverse has hit its teens in life. What sort of adult we get will be interesting. We do need to keep it out of the hands of a single authority whilst still allowing civilized discussion, for a given value of civilized. Instances can refuse to peer with others so we can gradually develop networks that work for subsets of the human race. The tricky bit is enabling this to happen within earthly laws and boundaries. Governments hate decentralization for obvious reasons. Instead of Messrs Apple, Google, MS etc they potentially have to deal with me and you and the other n billion people on the planet!

I've been a KDE lover since 2.0 or so. I recall compiling it from a tarball for a laugh and it mostly working, which was quite a surprise. I think I had Slackware installed at the time on my desktop and KDE 1.x on it.

Anyway, 23 or so years later ... I'm looking forward to 6. Things have changed a bit 8)

A discarded Windows laptop is ideal for use with Linux. That's what this Managing Director of an IT company has been doing for over a decade. My desktop PC is a customer cast off from a good five years ago. I slapped in an ageing Nvidia el cheapo card to get two monitors running. My laptop is a cast off from one of my employees - I simply opened it up and moved my M.2 card into it.

I do run ESET on my Linux gear to show solidarity and to show that Linux really is rather more resource friendly than Windows. I login to AD and I use Evolution with Kerb to access Exchange for email. I have the same "drive mappings" to the same file servers too and so on and so forth.

I used to teach word processing, spreadsheeting and databases n that for UK govt funded courses, I've written a Finite Capacity planner for a factory in Excel (note the lack of In-). I still find people who have no idea how decimal tab stops work or how to efficiently use styles. I can confidently inform you that Libre Office is just as good as MSO. They both have their ... issues but both work pretty well.

Kids are easy. Adults are a pain! KDE has a lot of educational games ready to go out of the box.

A quick search comes up with "Phone Link" which only seems to work with Windows on the "PC" end, whereas KDE Connect will work everywhere that KDE works, which includes Windows.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/windows/sync-across-your-devices

It really isn't the same as Konnect which is a bloody marvel! I've used it for years.

Try installing a User Agent switcher into your browsers and then fake your browser ID. FF works fine with Teams, Exchange and M365 - I have been an IT consultant installing or using all of that lot for over two decades.

I too have a favourite browser. It used to be FF up to about 15 years ago (v2 or so) then Google were cool and I went all in on Chrome. I then went Chromium. I actually started out with telnet but that's another story.

A couple of months ago I finally dumped Chromium and co and went back to FF. Biggest win for me was a slightly less opinionated SSL experience. That needs some explaining:

I run a lot of IT and that means a lot of SSL certs. Mostly I use Lets Encrypt if I can as well as the usual suspects. Sometimes a site does not need SSL at all. Googles browsers are very VERY opinionated about this: "Thou shall not use thy browser password manager with self signed SSL certs". FF has a slightly less opinionated "Thou canst TOFU and thy password manager will work". I spend a lot of time pissing around with uploading CA certs to group policy objects and copying them to /usr/local/share/ca-certificates and getting the machines to trust them. On Arch we use /etc/ca-certifictes etc and so on and so forth. I also have to deal with Teams - FF works better now than Cr browsers

I've returned to FF after a very long time and I don't regret it at all. I run Arch actually!

9th Jan ...

"A hell of an improvement especially for the AMD EPYC servers"

Look closely at the stats in the headers of those three tables of test results. The NICs have different line speeds and the L3 cache sizes are different too. IPv4 and 6 for one and only IPv6 for the other.

Not exactly like for like!

Bizarre article: "Recently, Linux-based firmware has emerged as a powerful alternative"

I have a stack of Dell OS9 switches in my computer room - they boot BSD. I have sold and set up Dell OS10 switches - they boot Debian ... on the control plane. To be fair they can run quite a few OS's on the control plane. On both, you can switch to a shell (BASH) and fiddle with Ansible and the like or you stick with the usual interface.

They are not glorified PCs! Frames and packets pass through some very fancy electronics and some very specialized memory (CAM - Content Addressable Memory) is employed for certain tasks. The manuals for these beasts run to 1500 pages.

I also have a large fleet of pfSense and VyOS routers and a Mikrotik or two and a slack handful of Fortiwotsits, oh and a Cisco thing or two and some others. pfSense is BSD and the rest are Linux. The Fortis are a bit more like modern switches with their own rather odd and twitchy way of doing things, backed up with some fancy and not so fancy hardware.

I have also played with all of the distros mentioned: Tomatoe/DD-WRT/OpenWRT and they are great for cheekying up a rather rubbish ISP provided router. They are also great for running on budget gear. They are basically superb for budget conscious consumers that are capable of reading some very decent docs. Prosumer is the term, I think.

Anyway, this article is rather odd and is basically filler. The section titled: "Case Studies and Real-World Examples" is a contender for fluff of the month.

My laptop is a cast off from a member of my staff who said it was too slow - a (dmidecode) - Product Name: HP 255 G6 Notebook PC. It now runs Arch (actually).

It previously slogged along with Win 10, Outlook n O365 n that. Now it does Libre Office, Evolution and much more. I use KDE, which isn't known for a light touch on the resources. I also do light CAD and other stuff.

My office desktop is even older - it was a customer cast off, due to be skipped around six years ago. I did slap a SSD into it and I think I upped the RAM to 8GB. Its a (ssh, dmidecode): Product Name: Lenovo H330 and the BIOS is dated from 2012! I run two 23" screens off it and again, it runs Arch (actually) and KDE for pretty stuff. I run containers on it - at the moment a test Vikunja instance. I have apache, nginx and caddy fronting various experiments backed up with postgres and mariadb.

Both devices are "domain joined" and I auth to Exchange via Kerberos, via Samba winbind. File access (drive letters for the Windows mindset) is currently via autofs. I have a project on at a member of staff's request to switch from Windows to Linux. I'm going to take my time and get it right. My current thinking is the Fedora KDE spin and this: Closed In Directory

I know what you mean. You've already read a load of log files on behalf of an "engineer" who seems incapable of doing it themself. You've also eliminated DNS and NTP and laughed at suggestions relating to SFC /SCANNOW. Then you roll up your sleeves and plug into the Matrix ...

In the UK at least, the POTS (Plain Old ...) copper phone lines carry an electrical current as well as signals and can power the handset. There are certain guarantees about this so that in an emergency your phone will still work so you can dial 999 (our original emergency number) or 112. Our fire regulations require something like 30 minutes before things should start failing. In the real world, you get out immediately and use your mobile.

We have an emergency alarm monitoring system used by businesses. Its generally known as "Red Care" which was a brand run by BT (British Telecom). You have a small device connected to a phone line (and powered by it) and it will monitor your fire detectors and building access control systems and a 24 hour manned monitoring centre will notify you in the event of an emergency. Nowadays, these devices will use your wifi and internet connection. Sometimes: old school is best.

Great job. The Arch layer is missing the word "actually" 😜

If I recall correctly Arch has ... ssh into wifey's laptop ... python installed out of the box.

Run up a console and type python, and hit enter. Type in print ("Hello World") and hit enter. There you go!

If you lack a python: $ yay -S python.

Because Ubuntu LTS works very reliably

Ubuntu pulled a blinder many years ago with their LTS model. You get a new one every two years with five years support for each one and a guarantee of moving from one to the next. That gives you quite a lot of time to deal with issues, without requiring you to live in the stoneage.

For example: Apache Guacamole is a webby remote access gateway thingie. It currently requires tomcat9 because TC9->10 is a major breaking change. Ubuntu 22.04 has TC9 and Ubuntu 24.04 has a later version (probably 10). However Ubuntu 22.04 is supported until 2027. So we stick at Ubuntu 22.04 and get security updates etc.

Guacamole is currently at 1.5.5, and the next version will be 1.6.0. The new version will have lots of functionality additions. The devs will then worry about Tomcat editions and the like. Meanwhile Ubuntu will still be supported.

In my opinion the two year release/five year supported model is an absolute belter.

My wife's laptop absolutely has to work. For some mad reason I decided on Arch for it. Actually a rolling distro is not so mad. You get the latest stuff and in general issues are fixed as quickly as a LTS jobbie or you get a work around in the forums or you dig out the source and a compiler. It's no accident that the Arch wiki is an oft cited resource. Its not for everyone!

I've been looking at a similar thing for my company and Kubuntu so far is my choice and I've already ditched the LTS bit. I need to run AV and the usual corporate bollocks to pass silly tick box exercises, so my options are rather limited.

There is no perfect one size fits all distro, that's what we have rather a lot of them to choose from - they rise and fall according to natural selection and not artifice. Imagine if all computers were sold with a free/libre OS or none at all and Windows or Apples were a paid for add on. Monolithic OSs are completely deluded about being able to cater for all, without some dreadful contortions.

Anyway, back to the job in hand! If you want a LTS then you must accept older software or you use an LTS as a base and add newer stuff yourself. Most Linux distros allow you to run your own add-ons formally or informally. Gentoo has a rather nifty user patching mechanism for distro ebuilds and you can have your own ebuilds take over entirely. RPM and pkg distros can handle user packages and Ubuntu has PPAs too. I could go on. Also you can go off piste and put stuff into /opt and/or /usr/local!

Please reconsider your use of the term "unstable". I suggest you write down a list of your requirements and score them according to importance. Then grab a list of OSs and distros - all of them, don't preclude Windows and Apples: they have their uses. Then score the OSs/distros against your requirements. The scoring might be in the form of a matrix (table). I suggest keeping it simple with a score of -1 to 1 for each item (-1=dislike, 0=neutral/whatevs, +1=like)

Do a pilot project and see how that goes. Take your time. If it is for personal use then run your tests in a VM. Most modern hardware can easily run a VM or two. Virtualbox or VMware Worskstation or KVM (libvirt is a good effort)

The choice is yours. Note that word "choice" - its very important.