Commuting isn't that bad, at least not any worse than anywhere else. When choosing your base, check out how many daily flights there from you to that base. You want as many as possible. Also pay close attention to when the earliest flight to the base is and when the latest flight back home is.

Short call reserve sucks as a commuter because as an FO you'll rarely be called but you always have to be within 2 hours of the airport. But short call reserve only lasts a couple months. Once you have a few months worth of seniority, you can bid for "commutable" trips (i.e. trips that start after a certain time to make it so you can commute the morning of without having to get a hotel). And if you can't quite hold a commutable line, you can always bid for long call reserve so you have a 12 hour call out. Commuting stopped sucking so badly for me when I finally got at least long call.