I haven't played Nethack in years (and I was always terrible at it), but I've read some about Nethack4 and how OG Nethack has been releasing some updates after many years of hiatus... so my question is, which Nethack do people play these days? after diving into DC:SS again for the first time in years and seeing all the changes, and playing the just-1.0'd Jupiter Hell a fair amount as well, I've been thinking about going back and revisiting Nethack again.
Unnethack is probably my favorite fork of nethack. It has a lot of extra dungeons and new stuff without just it being a bunch of unbalanced chaff with breaking fundamental nethack ideas. (Sorry slashem fans).
For the general turn based roguelike games check out caves of qud. It has its flaws but is incredibly interesting.
not to take away from their quality, but I'm constantly amazed that nobody has really one-upped PD/SPD in terms of mobile traditional roguelikes! are there any others you'd recommend? I can never seem to find any and always end up going back to SPD
UnNethack is really good. Like the sibling poster, I too play a lot of Qud, but it kind of comes from a different tradition of roguelikes so it might not scratch the same itch. It's spectacular, though.
Cogmind comes to mind as being a neat riff off of the "hack" style of roguelikes, and the developer is super open and cool about the game. Or, for a little bit of an older but a much broader experience, you could check out Dungeons of Dredmor.
(As you mentioned--Jupiter Hell just came out and it's the sequel to DoomRL and it's awesome, if you like more coffeebreak-style roguelikes!)
I've gotten back into NH recently and it's been awesome. Really a timeless game. Remember to have a look at tweaking some options (https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Options) - "O" is a much better boulder than "`". Also, #hardfought on Libera.Chat is really active and is a great place to get advice. When you get tired of NetHack you can try out EvilHack (https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Evilhack)
(also: just noticed this post is from 2014!)