Maybe what I’m looking for is the holy grail, but what do you guys suggest as a Distro with a good balance between stability and up-to-date packages?
openSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s not stable as in unchanging but it is stable as in reliable.
+1 for Tumbleweed, it works so incredibly well. In the very rare case where an update doesn’t work out for you, you can easily roll back to a previous btrfs snapshot.
Fedora is quite nice, too, but I’ve come to prefer rolling distros over a release based one.
Kalpa / Aeon might be interesting, too, if your use case fits an immutable distro.
Having tried many over the years, there is truly nothing as good as Tumbleweed.
@blackstripes @MyNameIsRichard this one is also great out of the context! (sorry!)