What do you consider to be the “Goldilocks” distro? the one that balances ease of install and use, up-to-date, stability, speed, etc… You get the idea.
I’m not a newb, these last few years I’ve lived in the Debian and derivatives side of things, but I’ve used RH, Slackware, Puppy :), and older stuff, like mandrake/mandriva and others. Never tried Suse or Arch, and while Nix looks appealing, I need something to put in production rapidly. I have tried Kinoite in a VM, but I couldn’t install something (which I can’t remember), and that turned me off.
Oh I’m on Mint right now, because lazy, but it’s acting up with a couple of VMs, which I need, I really don’t have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I’m a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.
I’m not sure how it works with PIA, but on Proton I can export multiple configs, let’s say 6 different ones with a combination of countries and other options.
Then I add them all into KDE and I can switch between them at will.
It’s a slight extra cost of time at the start, but after that it’s smooth and easy.
Their OVPN performance isn’t as good as WG, so it’s really just a backup solution in my mind.
But my main point is that there exist edge cases like that where “install it in a distrobox” isn’t a panacea. You either have to learn
podman
and how to forward your network traffic through the container or learn how to pack your own flatpak/appimage/RPM.