WARNING TO NEW LINUX USERS: USING DISTROS NOT FORKED FROM DEBIAN/RHEL WILL MAKE FINDING TECH SUPPORT HARDER
GoboLinux with its symlink system to make the file hierarchy more human readable is something I find cool.
I stumbled upon it because I wanted to go back to using AwesomeWM (learned a little LUA from payday modding) and it's somehow the only distro to offer it as a default.
NixOS for sure. There are aspects that are annoying and the learning curve is pretty steep, but deterministic builds and (relatively) easy package version management is :chefs-kiss:
Haven't tried out NixOS yet, but it looks exciting and I'm gonna take it for a spin in a VM this week.
guix seems cool, i havent tried it yet but im thinking about it
If you want an even weirder recommendation, I've never tried it myself but I hear that Exherbo is made by Gentoo people who decided that gentoo didnt go far enough 👀
IIRC dependency hell can be auto-resolved by dnf but not yum orapt.
EndeavourOS. Arch based but incredibly easy to get started with, and, of course, also has the benefit of the ridiculously extensive ArchWiki .
Gentoo. The way you can change build options for individual packages and have it reflected in the resulting dependency graph is pretty unique. Most other package managers essentially have static dependency graphs and sometimes offer you separate packages of the same program as a workaround (like Emacs and Emacs without GUI support).
I've tried NixOS as well but I didn't stick with it. It does so many things in a unique way that there's no way to use it without constantly cross-referencing the Nix documentation with the upstream documentation and digging into the Nix code to see what on earth they're doing. The error messages are completely useless and it needs a lot more documentation. It is very cool though.
