I used to love trying every new Ubuntu release. Then snap came along. :( After 17 years of Ubuntu (6.04-23.10), with only a few years of centos in the middle, I switched back to Debian. I see this release is still all-in with snap. Lame.
I went from using slackware late 90s early 00 to Mac OSX in early/mid 00. When coming back to Linux late 00 early 10s I was so disappointed in the Linux distros. I tried Ubuntu but was very disappointed in the lack of newer versions of third party software in their repo. Tried Arch for a while and while packages were up to date, every now and then the OS updates would mess something up and I had to start troubleshooting.
It might be better now, but I eventually gave up and went to FreeBSD about 10 years ago. Stable base and separate up to date third party feels like the best of both worlds. Not sure if any llinux distro offers something like that now. No snap, no flatpack, just a base os and up to third party date packages.