Hello all and sorry for the potentially long post.
I’m fairly new to the linux world, after finally making the jump from windows 11 back in last December. Before taking the plunge, I roughly knew what I wanted: an always up-to-date system, wayland (I remember what a nightmare X11 was in 2014), KDE, availability of the need apps, compatibility with most of the games I was planning to run, stability, mature and large community for an eventual decent support.
So my search narrowed down on 3 options: fedora KDE, openSUSE tumbleweed KDE and openmandriva ROME KDE. I tried them all in liveUSB and I had issues with them all OOTB, but more with openSUSE and openmandriva. As I couldn’t find solutions for the said issues I had with the last two, I went with fedora, which was decent overall and I definitely could get things done running it on my Clevo laptop with nvidia rtx 2060 dgpu.
Interacting on various reddit pages, I got myself involved in a discussion about the aforementioned distros, where a more knowlegeable man than me offered himself to help me get rid of the openSUSE’s issues had I gone and install it.
I was more than happy to transition, as I was tempted by the perks openSUSE was offering over the other two: snapshots, OBS and even more bleeding edge software without the need to upgrade versions.
So the long night began with questions and a fresh install. The first issue was the suggested partitioning. I have two SSD’s (256gb + 1Tb) but the installer suggested to install everything on the smaller one and make a 2Gb swap partition on the bigger one. A more reasonable default proposal would not make newbies panic (in comparison, fedora joined them up in a big lump) and there is not much info online about 2ssd setups.
When I first tried opensuse, I booted straight into X11 while being told the distro has wayland enabled by default. I’ve been told that it does so because the system detects my nvidia and doesn’t have the right drivers for it. I couldn’t find any info on this matter on the official webpage. This is one of the issues that inclined me in favour of fedora. And when I unticked X during the installation process, I got a nice black screen as a reward. I’m not a computer engineer, but to me it looks very simple: nuke x11 so wayland takes over automatically. I’d really like the option to not have the bloody thing preinstalled knowing that I’d never ever use it again. It reminds me about screen tearing in linux. As I understand, tumbleweed associates with innovation, but x11 is not about it anymore.
At least I had the option to avoid as many preinstalled apps as I could. It should’ve gone even further, letting me avoid things like KUIviewer and similar unintelligible stuff I can’t even read properly 
. No media, no games, nothing. I know what apps I want on top of a clean install.
When I wanted to mount an .iso, I discovered openSUSE thinks that having a preinstalled Terminal -superuser is more important than dolphin-plugins (which gives me a default fully functioning file manager). The best KDE integration as someone said…
Now the biggest one: my clevo keyboard was incomplete without Fn bidings and backlight. Using the suggested driver off github was very easy with fedora: copy/paste, done and forgotten. Thankfully I met the right people on reddit and here on forum and I’m so glad to have it fully working. Now even my keyboard is customisable in KDE!
The white background in superuser Dolphin cannot be changed without additional settings either. It doesn’t want to follow the general theme.
Now on the bright side: IMHO opi is one of the most overlooked perk than opensuse has. It’s fkin genious! Wanna get chrome quick and easy? - opi chrome and the bloody thing even offers you multiple options! Video issues? - opi codecs and yes yes yes yes. Onlyoffice, telegram - all without wasting time on websites after rpms and guides. Now I feel like Discovery is useless Now my question is: are all these repos updated as soon as the flatpack versions get released?
Then upon installing opi, it asked to uninstall busybox-patch ( I needed it for the keyboard driver installation), so tell me if I can run into issues because of this please (I highly doublt it, but still).
Another brilliand thing is having snapshots. But before I come to use them, please tell me if I need to know something, as I expect to be confused by having a multitude of them.
The nvidia driver was faily easy to install too, the hybrid setup is recognised and so far works as intended.
To my surprise none of the Lutris games were working and I’ve wasted a few hours searching what various error codes mean. It turned out to be the transition to selinux that opensuse is going through. I’ve disabled it permanently for now and I hope to get an update on the forum or with one of the future zypper dup.
So overall not the best and easiest experience with the installation process, but once I got it up and running, it’s a joy to be used.
Thanks for the reading (sorry for the long post again) and thanks for your help! Have a nice one!