The difference between mainstream distros is shrinking. Soon, the most popular ones will come with pipewire, wayland and a recent GNOME with few modifications by default.

Thanks to flatpaks, appimages and snaps, I can finally have recently released software with a very stable distro. Hand compiled sofware often goes to /usr/local by default and I can install it without breaking anything. If I want bleeding edge without compiling it myself, I can still resort to guix, nix or homebrew.

The "native package manager" is not something we have to interact with so often these days. Linux on desktop has had some interesting improvements lately and the thing that was pointed by many as its biggest problem - fragmentation - is a much smaller issue now.