I labeled some of the lesser known logos. The criteria are arbitrary and I made this based on how much I liked using it.
Note that Fedora Sway Atomic isn’t bad, but I had a bad experience because I was trying to install NIri on it and it clearly wasn’t meant for that. Basically, it’s just not for me.
I wanted to rank Manjaro low because I heard bad things about it, but I think I used it for like a few minutes because I wanted to try Gnome, and I didn’t like Gnome after trying it and didn’t want to deal with uninstalling all the Gnome stuff manually, so I just hopped to another distro.
I tried Mint and Bazzite on my laptop, installed Bazzite on my Desktop, wasn’t happy with the atomic style (wanted to install a lot of stuff and switch to the low-latency-kernel for music production),
switched to OpenSuse Tumbleweed and stayed there. I got a second Desktop PC for cheap from a friend, took out the GPU, installed Debian on it and run Game Servers (Minecraft, Satisfactory, TF2) on it now.
Very happy with both Tumbleweed (as a daily driver) and Debian (for my server).
Out of curiosity, what is it you like about openSUSE? It’s been forever since I’ve messed around with it and was considering switching to it from Mint (having some graphics stability issue possibly coming from my bizarre monitor layout giving X11 headaches while using KDE, which Mint doesn’t really optimize for)
I like the GeekOSDaw Audio packages (especially QJackCTL);
I prefer KDE Plasma over Cinnamon (I know you can use Mint with Plasma);
It’s stable, reliable (apart from some issues with Nvidia drivers, though they’ve gotten less frequent and easier to fix), and up to date.
I probably could have tried more distros, but I’m perfectly happy with where I am and thus see no need to experiment all that much.
I’ve previously installed CachyOS on the PC I’ve now got Debian on, to use it as a guest Gaming PC, and that was fine as well.
I’m mostly using X11 since everything runs on it (I’ve got a 3-to-4 monitor setup - 3 normally, with a beamer I can additionaly connect). Wayland works well for the most part, too, but some things are more glitchy on it.
Also, i found it pretty nice to have a centralized control panel (Yast) for things I didn’t/don’t know how to do in the terminal yet.
A Point of friction: Printer Drivers didn’t include the one we had when I installed Tumbleweed. Our roommate took the printer when he moved out, so it’s irrelevant for now, but i’m thinking of getting a laser printer sometime.
Personally, the zero-setup filesystem snapshotting was a big argument for it. I do not want to use an OS anymore, which does not have snapshotting or an equivalent.
Thankfully, this is becoming more commonplace, but for years, openSUSE was the only player in that game.