I’m looking for a stable rolling too. But since yesterday, I’ve quit tumbleweed for fedora.
I left tumbleweed because I wasn’t able to find/install/update non flatpak application. The bug is only for KDE (gnome last ISO works fine, but not the KDE ISO). It was not much of a problem since everything else worked for me, but I find it weird to not fix that kind of bug, even on a ISO.
I guess void Linux would be the answer, but it requires a bit of work to set it up. Maybe, when I’ll have time to learn a bit more about it.
Slow roll would be another option I guess : 1 month slower than Tumbleweed, but it is still flagged as experimental by suse.
Solus has been revived last year. I tested their first iso from 2023. I found it laggy and didn’t liked the package manager, but 1 year can make big changes on Linux.
I would stick to basic recommendations and go from easiest to more and more advanced distribution, to avoid scaring beginners :
graphical installation + easy to setup (nvidia + codec )+stable : basically Ubuntu based distribution (but not Ubuntu, some snaps, i.e. steams, are more bugged than the flatpak and the .deb . I wouldn’t recommand a distribution that force bugged app for beginners ) + others
graphical installation : user will have to install nvidia drivers, codec or other useful things manually. The distribution can have several update a week with more risk to break, but is still considered solid and has a preconfigured way to roll back (snapshot) or more lightweigth and stable depending of the choice : fedora, opensuse tumbleweed, Debian+ others…
do it yourself distributions : for advanced users or motivated people that want to learn it the hard way. Distributions are up to date and have either a risk to break or user has to manually configure about everything (or both ) : arch, void Linux, gentoo, …
“Gaming” distributions could be placed between the 2 first categories as they are a kind of out of the box distribution but more up to date than the stable distributions.
Low ram/CPU consumption could be a side option at every step (easy, mid, hard)
I didn’t tried immutable distributions in a while, so I don’t know how to place them. My experience one year ago (kinoite, silver blue, blend os), was that it was more complicated than a regular distribution to do what I needed, but it was 1 year ago, so I wouldn’t know where to place it.
I’m quite a beginner in Linux, I love to test distributions to see how far I can go without using the terminal, and without breaking the distribution. So my vision can be quite narrow comparing to more experienced users.