Hm, death could be interpreted in a number of ways.

Does Almalinux’s 10 year support represent death by being unchanging, stagnation?

Or should it mean a distro that is on death’s door, with less and less developers working on it each year? Solus, Mageia and OpenMandriva might qualify there.

Void Linux seems fitting from the name alone, though otherwise doesn’t really go with the theme.

Personally I’d recommend Linux Mint, as your likely to have a very positive experience with it.

Fedora hasn’t been all roses for my particular setup either, since they fully dropped X11 in the latest version, but my hardware combo isn’t viable yet with Wayland, ultimately making me land on Linux Mint (which has been pretty dang nice).

I also tried OpenSUSE slowroll before trying Fedora, which I love the concept of, but an update on that seemed to bork my system (second monitor would remain blank upon booting), which made me a bit skeptical of its claims of extra stability over normal Tumbleweed.

I haven’t experienced any friction from DNF, so personally I don’t see it as a con. I just think Fedora has a useful middle ground between new packages and stability.

Fedora is a solid middle ground between Arch and Debian.

Even with the automated testing, Tumbleweed will still sometimes introduce problems with updates. They mitigate the risk of that with Snapper, so you can rollback to a previous state if things get borked.

Personally, though I’ve tried it a few times, I just can’t get on with openSuse distros.

1. Updating is really slow since Zypper does one task at a time, compared to DNF or Apt which can download and install multiple packages at once
2. Updating is particularly slow in the US, since most opensuse servers are in the EU
3. Yast is powerful for enterprise/sysadmins, but is damn clunky to use for everyday normal stuff (IMHO).

I’d honestly just go for Fedora if you want up-to-date packages, perhaps Nobara if you want it more pre-setup for gaming and codecs. It’s much more slick overall.

For those needs, an old used thinkpad off ebay would be pretty ideal. Affordable, well built and reliable. Only downside is I think the smallest model is a 12"

Perhaps a Chromebook known for being compatible with being flashed with Linux?