Hello, fellow internet users. I am currently using Debian but would like a distro to try the new Gnome on. I have been using Debian for a while and I love the stability, but would like newer packages. I also, for no rational reason, would like to be able to use the default package manager exclusively. I used Fedora before and liked it more than Debian (apart from that it felt vaguely Windowsey) but I would like to distance myself from the whole red hat thing. What distro do you think I should get?
Depends.
Do you mind a Rolling Release? If not, try Arch, either Vanilla with the AUR enabled or EndeavourOS. The default package manager (Pacman) + the AUR has pretty much everything you could need without resorting to flatpaks, snaps, or appimages (or, did you mean something else when you said you’d “like to use the default package manager exclusively”?).
If you want something you don’t have to constantly babysit, OpenSUSE Leap is a good choice and has as big of a selection as Arch does, or so I heard, anyways. There’s also Ubuntu if you don’t mind Canonical’s Snaps (or know how to get rid of em). You also get the benefits of DEB packages IIRC, but don’t know if you’d count them as part of the “Default Package Manager” or not…and off the top of my head, that’s it. I’m sure there’s more, but none that you can get away with only using native files on it are coming to me
OpenSuse leap looks great. I think I will try installing it right now because I recently reinstalled Debian and my computer is in a fairly blank state. Thanks for the recommendation.