Use the distribution of your choice, but with the most recent mainline kernel. The releases are already gated by the LKML process, so don't worry about actual,

Use the distribution of your choice, but with the most recent mainline kernel. The releases are already gated by the LKML process, so don't worry about actual, non-pre kernel releases being too unstable for any normal desktop/workstation usage. If you don't lack the skills, and are ok with the system telling you when you need to spend some time on transitioning configurations/library versions, consider using Arch Linux. It will demand manual configuration to some extend, but that's mostly just enabling (and rebooting/manually-starting) systemd units for things like a GUI login manager. The benefit is, that you don't rely on backports for bug fixes, allowing things like youtube-dl (interacting with uncooperative websites by ~scraping) to work from the official repositories.