I’ll throw in my vote for Manjaro because while it’s not perfect, it hits all of OP’s points nicely.
- arch based
- hard to break (but not impossible)
- biased a little towards Gnome but runs KDE and XFCE great too
- uses a curated rolling release
The last point is the most important. Rolling release means it updates regularly, so your packages will be mostly up to date. Curated means they do testing in an unstable repository. If an update breaks something, those changes aren’t pushed to stable.
I ended up with it after trying other distros but having trouble with my nVidia card. Manjaro’s MHWD tool installed their drivers easily (although slightly confusing with its unnecessary checkboxes) and more recently, I’ve upgraded to AMD and never had a single issue.
It’s not perfect but almost every issue I’ve had was located between the keyboard and the chair.
All the naysayers in these comments read like shills and if they aren’t, they really should read how the tracking in question works. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution?as=u&utm_source=inproduct
While it was kinda lame for Mozilla to add it with it already opted-in the way they did, they were still completely open about how it works from the start with a link right next to the feature in settings (the same link pasted above) and it’s far less invasive than the other mainstream browsers.
It can be turned off too, easily. It requires unchecking a checkbox. No jumping through 10 different menus trying to figure out how to turn it off, like a certain other browser does with its monstrous tracking and data collection machine.
With ublock origin it’s also moot, since ublock origin blocks all the ads anyways.
Call me a fanboy if you want, I wont care. Firefox is still the superior browser in my opinion.