I am considering moving away from Ubuntu, but I haven't tried other distributions for years. I started on Linux Mint Cinnamon back in 2012, but switched to Ubuntu when I built my current PC in 2020 because I wanted more up-to-date packages. Now I am faced with needing to replace my SSD which gives me reason enough to install a new distro. I have an AMD Ryzen 7 2700X with 32G of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, so I would need something that plays nicely with nvidia. I routinely use libreoffice, digikam, gimp, virtualbox, bambu studio, sublime text, filezilla, thunderbird, minecraft, steam, Open WebUI and Stable Diffusion (Automatic1111). I liked Ubuntu because it was familiar, fairly easy to customize, and everything was kept fairly well up to date. I am not a big fan of snap, and I would prefer a more logical and unified package management system. I was wondering if you all had some recommendations for me. Thanks
Linux Mint Debian Edition. You can use Debian testing repos for more updated packages and kernels if you want. Also, it seems like more and more applications are adopting flatpak anyway.
Since you have experience on Linux, why not Arch Linux. It's not that hard-to-master-install from the past since "archinstall" exists.
And you get a system with all your wishes of combinations that exist in the linux world. And the best well documented Wiki from Arch stays at your side.
Alternative would be fedora, easiest installer of all. And their logic of "just all firmwares, can't fail" should help nvidia users out-of-the-box.
Fedora is usually pretty good at being up to date while still user friendly and still operate like a classic distro. The immutable ones are also pretty nice if you're into that. Otherwise you could consider Arch or Endeavour. If you've been using Linux since 2012, an Arch distro's probably easier than you think.
I switched to Arch in 2011 after being on Ubuntu since 7.04 and the Unity disaster... and I'm still running that install to this day. I'm typing this from it!
In practice I've found Arch's always up to date packages to be less of a hassle than dealing with dependency hell of carefully pulling newer dependencies when you inevitably need a newer feature of a package. Worst case there's containers for the few stubborn "only works on this exact version of Ubuntu" cases but it's pretty rare.
pop is a pretty similar distro that should be compatible with what you want to do, but i'm not sure how much it hits for a more unified package management system. it's really hard to beat the AUR and a AUR helper like
paru
for that.