I'm a long time Windows user who has experience with WSL. Last year, I needed a laptop for university, and out of laziness, opted for a Macbook since, although they're expensive as hell, are reasonably reliable....
The Mac hardware does limit the choice of distributions a bit. Besides that I can highly recommend Debian 12 as a rock solid base system with Nix as package manager to get latest and greatest software.
Actually the nice thing is that you can use Nix package manager on any Linux distribution.
I am not an Arch-user, but I would say so. At least Nix itself claims that their unstable channel is the largest and most up-to-date package repository currently followed by AUR. So yes, I think you can have best of both worlds - a rock solid base system with the newest software via Nix.
It even gets better with Home Manager.
Moving to a Linux distro for dev
I'm a long time Windows user who has experience with WSL. Last year, I needed a laptop for university, and out of laziness, opted for a Macbook since, although they're expensive as hell, are reasonably reliable....