The 6-month release cycle makes the most sense to me on desktop. Except during the times I choose to tinker with it at my own whim, I want my OS to stay out of my way and not feel like something I have to maintain and keep up with, so rolling (Arch, Tumbleweed) is too often. Wanting to use modern hardware and the current version of my DE makes a 2-year update cycle (Debian, Rocky) feel too slow.

That leaves Ubuntu, Fedora, and derivatives of both. I hate Snap and Ubuntu has been pushing it more and more in recent years, plus having packages that more closely resemble their upstream project is nice, so I use Fedora. I also like the way Fedora has rolling kernel updates but fixed release for most userspace, like the best of both worlds.

I use Debian stable on my home server. Slower update cycle makes a lot more sense there than on desktop.

For work and other purposes, I sometimes touch Ubuntu, RHEL, Arch, Fedora Atomic, and others, but I generally only use each when I need to.

If the only problem is that you can’t use dynamic linking (or otherwise make relinking possible), you still can legally use LGPL libraries. As long as you license the project using that library as GPL or LGPL as well.

However, those platforms tend to be a problem for GPL in other ways. GPL has long been known to conflict with Apple’s App Store and similar services, for example, because the GPL forbids imposing extra limits that restrict user freedom and those stores have a terms of service that does exactly that.

If it was a community addition why would it matter? And why would they remove the codecs.

You don’t have to be a corporation to be held liable for legal issues with hosting codecs. Just need to be big enough for lawyers to see you as an attractive target and in a country where codec patent issues apply. There’s a very good reason why the servers for deb-multimedia (Debian’s multimedia repo), RPM Fusion (Fedora’s multimedia repo), VLC’s site, and others are all hosted in France and do not offer US-based mirrors. France is a safe haven for foss media codecs because its law does not consider software patentable, unlike the US and even most other EU nations.

Fedora’s main repos are hosted in the US. Even if they weren’t, the ability for any normal user around the world to host and use mirrors is a very important part of an open community-friendly distro, and the existence of patented codecs in that repo would open any mirrors up to liability. Debian has the same exact issue, and both distros settled on the same solution: point users to a separate repo that is hosted in France which contains extra packages for patent-encumbered codecs.

I stopped using Arch a long time ago for this same reason. Either Fedora (or derivatives like Nobara) or an atomic/immutable distro (like Bazzite, Silverblue, Kinoite) is probably the way to go.

I used to feel like Ubuntu was a good option for this, but it no longer is: too often they try to push undesirable changes that need manual tweaking to fix after release upgrades. Debian Stable is generally good for low-maintenance use but doesn’t keep up as well with newer hardware or newer updates to video drivers and mesa, which makes it suboptimal for typical gaming use. Debian Testing can be prone to break things in updates (in my experience, worse than Arch does).

I saw another comment recommend Rocky/RHEL, but note that their kernel doesn’t support btrfs. Since you mentioned a root snapshot, I expect you probably use it.