I wish there were more community-based distros with such a wide variety of software and very recent packages.
There are.
you just need to pick your poison based on your knowledge
Which would you recommend?
I’m quite happy with Fedora KDE at the moment. The release schedule is sane, there’s actual QA, integration with PackageKit and KDE technologies are pretty good out of the box (not perfect, but better than Arch), and the default repos stay reasonably up to date and have lots of stuff. Most of the things they don’t have are in the 3rd-party RPMFusion repo which does a good job of avoiding getting out of sync with the main repos.
My only major complaints are that the Anaconda installer is incredibad, and installing KDE Connect doesn’t automatically create an allow-list entry in the firewall to let it work; you need to do this yourself.
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And just to tag on here, it may depend on what packages you want to be very recent - if it’s mostly KDE packages that you need to be very recent in the distribution’s repositories, but other software you mostly get from Flathub anyway (or could deal with Debian/Ubuntu speed), then something like Kubuntu could also be a great solution.
IMO Discover under Kubuntu (as long as you install the Flatpak support after install, of course) is the gold standard for graphical software stores on Linux - searching, installation, updating and removal of system components, add-on software in distribution repos, Flatpaks and Snaps. Plus with Kubuntu, you get all of the “it just works” user-friendly benefits of Ubuntu, and then a nice community layer of KDE folks on top who are thinking about the desktop user experience.
(I say this as someone who’s on openSUSE Tumbleweed myself, but I’m enough of a tweaker that I like the “talkativeness” of zypper and the things that require a bit more hands-on, like the installer, I actually kind of enjoy)
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If you want to use a GUI installer for Arch, you can use Pamac (the default software manager from Manjaro, another Arch based OS). It is meant to be used for as a GUI for Arch based distros, Discover is not.
I haven’t tried Fedora; I try to stick to community distros as I’m wary of any with a profit motive.
Fedora is a community distro. The one with the profit motive involved is RHEL.
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it may depend on what packages you want to be very recent
This is a very good point. For me, it is mostly KDE stuff, but also design software. Projects like Inkscape are getting new features constantly these days, and there are issues with the appimage.
Nonetheless, I would be very tempted by KDE Neon if not for the fact that it’s based on Ubuntu. I just don’t trust corporate / profit-driven distros not to engage in bad behavior.
with Kubuntu, you get all of the “it just works” user-friendly benefits of Ubuntu
Honestly though, I do not mind setup at all. I don’t need a user-friendly OOTB experience because I’m probably going to want to change it anyway. I’ve been very happy with EndeavourOS on my main machine and have enjoyed the Arch VM I set up for testing. The thing that irritates me about the PackageKit situation isn’t that it doesn’t come out of the box, but that you simply can’t install, configure, and use it without incurring a lot of risk (as I now understand). After all, as I’ve said up upthread, I use ‘yay’ for system updates, and often use pacman for installation anyway. I just really like browsing software with Discover and I’m being a baby about it haha.
I had no idea! I thought it was directly developed by Red Hat, so I had been concerned that they might add telemetry or shut down some important feature of something.
Right enough, I do use this on the one Manjaro system I have left. It does give me grief sometimes, but over all it’s not bad! I wish it were in QT though.
Octopi is similar to pamac, and Qt:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/octopi
https://tintaescura.com/projects/octopi/
In my undeniably biased way, I would still suggest using pacman and yay on the command line, but octopi will give you more information about what is going on when installing packages than discover.