I tried I guess it was SuSE back in the mid-2000's. It was good for an RPM distribution. I'm not an RPM fan though. I've seen the RPM repo corrupt itself on SuSE, Red Hat before the split they did when they created RHEL and later at work on RHEL (one place I worked where they used RHEL). Tried Ubuntu 2006 at home and have used it since then. Run KDE desktop on it.

The Firefox thing was a simple fix since I also don't use snap, I just downloaded the Firefox tar file and run it. Using Help About, it updates itself, fast and efficiently. No snaps needed. No Ubuntu repository needed.

It sounds like those incidents were 20 years ago, though? I've heard similar stories from that era, but the rpmdb getting corrupted hasn't been a prevalent issue for a long time.

The last one was at work with RHEL 10 years ago, it has been long enough I should consider trying an RPM distribution again. Debian based distributions as far as the package repository hasn't give me issues but maybe RPM issues have been sorted out, good point.

Ironically, I much prefer rpm over dpkg for precisely the same reason; faced with approximately the same database corruption, I've recovered rpm where as far as I could tell dpkg was just completely hosed.

This is one of the reasons I will switch from Ubuntu back to Debian. Any Ubuntu tutorial will work for Debian. The laptop I am on today will be my last Ubuntu install.