I like stability and cleanliness. Security by default. Least mental load possible long-term.

Excellent breakdown of your desires! FWIW, I definitely resonate with these as well.

I'm currently testing out NIXos. Next will be VanillaOS, 3rd will be Fedora Silverblue.

One simply can't ignore the fact that these are so-called atomic distros. Which makes a ton of sense considering what you set out for. FWIW, my personal takes on the individual projects are as follows:

• NixOS is pretty excellent. If the epitome of cleanliness is reached with becoming stateless, then there's simply no other viable alternative.
• For VanillaOS, I feel it has yet to fully realize its promise. Or, at least, hasn't fulfilled whatever's required to break into the (relative) 'mainstream' for one reason or another.
• Fedora Silverblue has been my daily-driver in some shape or form over the last three years 😅. As such, I'm clearly biased. However, I'd reckon secureblue, i.e. a derivative that goes all-in on security, is actually more interesting for you.

Anyone have good recommendations? Easy backups, stability, security first posture, least maintenance and memory load. I hate getting scattered in symlinks, scripts, and filesystem placing.

Honestly, with Fedora Atomic and Nixos, you're already considering the very best at the job. Though, for completeness' sake, consider looking into openSUSE Aeon as well. While I'd argue the other two are currently more interesting, I wouldn't want to dismiss it altogether.

Beyond these, we find some other distros that miss something crucial for them to be considered a legit candidate/alternative:

• Guix System can put up a decent fight against NixOS and may even sway you over if you're into lisp. Unfortunately, though, it has yet to receive what flakes brought to the table for NixOS. Don't get me wrong; Guix' implementation of channels is vastly superior over Nix' and therefore Guix System doesn't gain as much from its (to be) flake counterpart. However, with flakes, NixOS becomes pretty smooth sailing. Like, you can just trust it to work reliably. With Guix, however, it can get ugly sometimes. Which can even lead the biggest Guix proponents back to NixOS...
• Kicksecure is another hardened-by-default distro worth mentioning. Sadly, unlike secureblue, it does nothing with atomicity.

What are some pros and cons of different distros?

This is too broad of a question 😅. If possible, narrow it down to some face-offs you're particularly interested in. After which I will try to help out if I can. Btw, I 'found' this comment that attempts to assign tiers to distros in terms of how they fare security-wise.

What do you daily drive as a power user?

Without going over what a power user is and/or if I would even qualify as such, I've been daily-driving secureblue for over a year now.

Give me your thoughts and recommendations! Thanks.

At this point, I think both NixOS and secureblue pose as the most interesting candidates for ya. The former peaks in cleanliness, while the latter peaks in security.

but describing an entire nonexistent init system without some kind of directive in that direction?

Someone else, i.e. the user called "notabot", had already made the following interesting observations:

• rye is software that actually exists and is found within the repos
• rye is written in rust
• rye has an init command; rye init

I don't think it's too far-fetched to think that an LLM is aware of the above. But, it failed to understand what rye actually is and how its init command isn't competing with systemd.

I got a couple I really like, though for vastly different reasons:

• The MNT Reform series takes the crown for their commitment towards open source software AND open source hardware.
• The ASUS Zenbook DUO is an early entry in the direction of what I perceive as peak design. This technology will only improve from here and I hope other vendors will take cues from this one.

What’s better? KDE? Or GNOME?

This is very much just personal taste and can even change from device to device; i.e. some folk swear by GNOME on their laptops but they also happen to swear by KDE Plasma on the desktop.

At the end of the day, you'd have to test it out for yourself to see which one you like better and under what circumstances.

And, finally, avoid giving too much credence to the exaggerated caricatures that are often presented in the online discourse.

Thank you! Unfortunately, I've come to the understanding it's not open source. So it's unlikely I'll go for it.

Ah okay, my apologies for not being clear enough!

While emacs and (neo)vim definitely fit the bill of CLI/TUI editors, I am open to GUI editors.

Thank you for allowing me to clarify myself!

And if GNOME is considered “not very customisable” in the linux world, KDE, Cinnamon, etc. must be even more customisable

It's more like GNOME doesn't come with a lot of customization options OOTB. You need extra tools -be it Tweaks, Extension Manager or the somewhat archaic Dconf Editor- to unleash the plethora of customization options in a palpable manner.

On the upside, GNOME's extensions do allow for extensive customization with 'ease'. Heck, this often goes beyond what other DEs are capable of (see e.g. PaperWM^[Which has inspired a full-blown WM in Niri.] or Material Shell^[For which Nicco, a KDE developer that also makes content on YouTube, said that its customization (likely) goes beyond what was possible on KDE Plasma at the time.]).

but I think I would always wonder if other distros were ‘more’ right for me.

Hahaha, very recognizable.

Your reply is much appreciated as it is yet another piece of (anecdotal) evidence that Arch-based distros can be picked up by complete newbs with success. While I don't think it's necessarily for everyone, the almost militant opposition by naysayers isn't warranted either.

Though I wonder, do you think you're more 'tech-savvy' than the average newcomer? Or, at least, more willing to read/understand/work for your system?

I want my apps to be able to talk to each other. So flatpak is just in the way.

This is (at least somewhat of) a legit concern. But is mostly directed towards Flatpak's limitations in its current implementation.

Also, I don’t see the point of immutable distros. I could boot off of btrfs snapshots years ago. Immutability gives me absolutely nothing of value either

Have you ever wondered why openSUSE started working on (what would eventually become) Aeon while they had previously pioneered the BTRFS + Snapper workflow with Tumbleweed? I believe you may find the point of immutable distros in there 😉.

If you're still (relatively) new to Linux and are mostly interested in "just works", then you simply can't go wrong with systemd. It has (for better or worse) become the de facto standard on Linux and is therefore often assumed to be present. Hence, actively resisting it might be 'costly'. Therefore, you should carefully consider whether it's worth straying from the beaten path. Like, what do you hope to achieve?

As for the elephant in the room, what alternative can even put up a fight? While I'd be the first to admit that systemd's design ethos leaves a lot to be desired; it's so feature-rich that I've yet to find any distro that puts good use to (almost) all of them. But, including everything and the kitchen sink does make it hard for its competitors to compete whenever it matters; perhaps it's one of the key reasons why systemd is as reliable as it is OR why attempting to replace systemd on Fedora/NixOS/openSUSE is a nonstarter. (Being founded and funded by Red Hat doesn't hurt either. Nor does it hurt when its main developer is on Microsoft's payroll.)

Though, even if I don't see the likes of OpenRC/runit/sysvinit ever compete with systemd in terms of capabilities, I am cautiously optimistic for dinit and s6.

~~LOL, who am I kidding, systemd will (probably) only be dethroned whenever its PipeWire/Wayland is introduced.~~

Would anyone that installed their current system using ventoy be at risk?

In absolute sense; we don't know for sure. It's possible to interpret this^[i.e. The lack of communication regarding this issue for more than a year, the recent finding in which fake root certificates are injected. And, of course, the maintainer finally addressing the issue.] in widely different ways:

• Just the unfortunate occurrence of a set of uneventful events from an innocent party that tries to make up.
• (OR) A facade (from a malignant/malicious party) in order to keep the communities' trust so that people continue to get caught in the web.
• (AND) Anything in between*

Should I reinstall?

You should make up your own mind on that. The last time I installed an OS, I had become aware of this concern (i.e. the blobs). At that time, trusting it for what it was, would go against the threat model I've set for myself. And, consequently, if I had any (other) systems that were installed with it, then I would have proceeded to reinstall. But I'm not you, nor are you me... So, at the end of day, if you had something that resembled a threat model, then you would have used that to answer this question for yourself. As you don't seem to have one, making one just for this seems overkill. However, you could (re)assess how safe your system is in its current state and act accordingly. (Just to name a couple of examples:)

• Do you just randomly run scripts that you've found on GitHub? Well, then this ventoy situation shouldn't be very concerning.
• Do you deliberately refuse to install the unverified software on Flathub and only^[Within the context of Flathub. The packages found in the repo of your distro are trusted by default.] stick to its verified offering?* Then, you should seriously consider reinstalling.

I'll try to keep it brief/concise/short. Apologies if this makes me come across as abrasive in the process.

If I'd attempt to distill the point(s) in your reply, I'd come to:

• You want to uphold the respect and good will (F(L))OSS developers absolutely deserve for doing the thankless work and effort they put. I'm with you on this. The only difference could be that I'm actively trying to uphold a standard^[You absolutely don't have to respect my standard or anyone else's. I just make the observation that everyone has 'a' standard for adopting (F(L)OSS.] for this and applying that (subjective) standard here. That's also why I asked you questions^[Those questions being: "But at what point do you start to second guess the intent behind the maintainer?" and "What should have happened for you to be more concerned?". Please don't feel necessarily pressed to answer them. However, I'm positive that it'll be instrumental to bridge our stances. On the note of questions, allow me to introduce a third one that might be beneficial in getting my point across, don't you think the handling of this issue (i.e. literal radio silence for over a year while it has arguably been the biggest issue in its history) leaves a lot to be desired?] to understand your standard in hopes of coming to a mutual understanding or at least a better understanding of each other.
• ~~Insinuating that I might have some anti-Chinese bias (or something). Honestly, I didn't want to go over this as I deliberately skipped a lot of other points (like implying that enterprise level code is somehow better, ignoring the fact that binary blobs go completely against the spirit of (F(L))OSS, ignoring that Ventoy -however small of a project you may view it- has a unique position for malicious use or somehow implying that big corpo software is more interesting to be targeted) that I didn't deem worth discussing here. I hope you understand why I couldn't ignore this (possible) 'allegation'. I'll keep it brief, though: No, it being supposedly by a person that knows Chinese doesn't even remotely affect my judgement and/or evaluation. I find it distasteful/appalling that that's even considered. But I thank you for laying your cards in this respect as this will help to move on to the actual meat of the conversation.~~