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.
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!)
+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.