I am currently using KUbuntu 22.04 LTS. I had thought that LTS meant long-term bug fixing, and not needing to reinstall / upgrade weekly or monthly, and getting stability and bugfixes.
I have discovered that while I have stability, I do not have bug fixes. In particular, plasma is still on the 5.x branch, with bugs and missing settings.
As I understand it, the "current best" I can do is every two years, update to the next LTS -- starting with 24.04.01 next month. (People are still saying to avoid the .0's in April). And even then, only getting updates every 6 months, and significant bugfixes only every 2 years.
That's not a desired state for me.
What I want: Relatively up to date KDE (sorry, I really dislike Gnome). Not "bleeding edge" / weekly dev updates, but rather "Yep, this has been tested and works". Updates to the system packages and login system (... why does the login screen / lock screen ignore my settings, and use a non-adjusted set of settings that includes things like "You closed the laptop lid? I'll move all your windows to the external monitor, and stay awake; why would you assume that's shutting down?").
I am not asking "What's the best distribution for my needs" (I'm asking that elsewhere); I am asking, "What's the best way to change distributions".
Am I required to reinstall to get a new distribution? Is there a way to just switch "Here are where you get packages" / "these are the packages for this distribution"?
What issues are likely to come up from swapping distributions? Is it safe? (which gets back to "do I have to reinstall")
And if I do have to reinstall, is there a good way to do so onto a second SSD? (I have seen some distributions that rely on fully automated installs that won't let you use partitions or second drives as you want -- they force reformats / specific install layouts.)