> Slightly tangential question: Is there a distro that has a stable "core" (kernel, maybe some userspace libraries) but uses rolling releases for everything else? Ideally, that would probably give you the best of both worlds for a personal machine.
I'm aware this isn't exactly what you were asking for—and with the disclaimer that I spent a lot of years as a Linux desktop user, so I do have a great deal of experience with how that "half" lives, but: this is one of the things that's so nice about MacOS + Homebrew. It's a very stable core (up through and including the graphical environment—after all, if that breaks on a workstation/desktop, that's nearly as bad as the whole OS breaking) that only updates every couple years (and I can ignore the updates a long time without notable consequences) with a very-high-package-count package manager that's rolling-release on top of it, for most of the software I directly use.
I'd love to see a Linux distro that worked that way—I don't think I could go back to doing package management the typical Linux way, on my workstation. I've done rolling-release, I've done everything-stable-and-maybe-some-bodged-in-extra-repositories-for-newer-stuff, and both suck, for my needs, compared to this arrangement. Stable core + rolling applications is great, would be thrilled to see more Linux distros explore that kind of thing.