this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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IMHO Arch is actually a great choice. They do have a minimum update frequency you need to maintain (I don't recall exactly, I think it is somewhere between 1 and 3 months) but if you do, and read the news before updates (and you are usually fine if you don't, usually the update will just refuse to run until you intervene) things are pretty seamless. I had many arch machines running for >5 years with no issues and no reason to expect that it would change. This is many major version updates for other distros which are often not as seamless.
That being said I am on NixOS now which takes this to the next level, I am running nixos-unstable but thanks to the way NixOS is structured I don't need to worry about any legacy cruft accumulating from the many years of updates.
And after all of that I don't think it really matters. I think any major distro you pick, weather stable, release-based or LTS will be fine. They all have some sort of update path these days. (unlike in the past where some distros just recommended a re-install for major updates).
I can update Debian after 4 months and it wont implode. I could even do it without a backup.
And i'd hate to be basically required to read 20 update news for 20 other packages scouring for the one important update info that could break my setup.
I think it's probably down to preference. I personally really like Fedora server because it comes pre-installed with the Cockpit webui which replaces the role of Portainer and makes other admin tasks like firewall openings and user management trivial. I'm definetly glad to have switched away from Ubuntu server which I was using before.
I run multiple Arch systems at home; laptops, NAS, media, etc. but I'd recommend a Debian based OS for a new starter... unless they're really, really keen to learn how everything works.