Linux

https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Kalpa for KDE

You absolutely can fail. I daily drive bazzite but many things have been pretty rough:

Any coding apps that will use an external device -> you can't use flatpak. You have to use distrobox that constantly freezes your entire mouse for 3-5 seconds upon any sort of dialog, settings, saving, anything where it has to access the filesystem. Then you have to add udev rules to directories that in the documentation says not to write to, and reloading the rules doesn't work for testing, you have to fully restart with every minor change or it will seem like the change didn't work.

Luckily most device drivers seem to work in the provided arch distrobox but holy dependency hell. Things will fail to install because they need a package that exists on the host but not the container so you get an unsolvable "file exists" conflict. When installing a package, it will sometimes just try to grab an old version of a dependency specifically that will 404 out instead of just grabbing the most recent version (never happened on arch itself to me)

Setting up a plasma vault with gocryptfs was not fun figuring out how. Also ran into tons of dependency problems and the fact that fedora just abandoned it specifically. Ended up just having to stick the binary in a random folder and point to it.

Any sort of document authentication/signing -> doesn't work and will not work in the future for a long time.

You absolutely have to install rpms still for corectrl, any external devices, like drawing tablets, etc...

Some games inexplicably use <50% GPU and <40% CPU with terrible framerates and will not go any higher (or lower) no matter what, switching between low and high settings and resolution results in 0fps change.

When I have my config set and don't have to change anything, it is super super nice to never have to manually update, but anything outside of very basic usage is weaving through nonstandard undocumented territory.

Bazzite trades maintenance headaches for configuration and installation headaches. For me, that is worth it.

Came from Arch and OpenSuse. Fedora has been such a great switch. As I’ve gotten older and became a dad, my computer time at home is limited and I don’t have endless evenings to troubleshoot shit. Fedora has been stable for me for the last 4 years. I use the KDE spin.

Thank you. I've run Fedora for a long while, too. Albeit, it was a while ago (not sure how good it is now), but I've never had any luck with its kde version. It was always broken (for me at least). Also, hunting for apps was kind of a big issue. Then come copr repos. But I guess we have a good case with flatpaks now. Even thought I couldn't use them before due to storage constraints, but now, that's not an issue. So, I'll keep Fedora in mind. I appreciate you

NixOS is great if you’re ready to learn Nix, which is an undertaking

I didnt even remember which os I had until I read this and remembered it was aurora

Seconded, I moved my gaming rig is on Bazzite and has been trouble free and maintenance free ever since.

I installed Bluefin on the laptop I gave my father, and it's been happily running trouble-free every single day since August without a single intervention. And my father is the kind of man who can conjure up unknown bugs, weird failures and random crashes by simple hand contact.

I use Bluefin myself, and it’s honestly been game changing. Using an immutable distro has been the greatest quality of life upgrade in my 15 years of using Linux.

Also, if you use distrobox (automatically installed with Bluefin, Aurora, Bazzite, etc.) you can even setup an Arch container and continue to use the AUR. I use Steam installed from within an Arch container and it doesn’t feel any different from a natively installed app. It also means I don’t have to use the Steam flatpak which I had a couple issues with.

OP, another vote for this one.

It addresses your concerns in a wonderful way:

• Reliability; While it's far from unique in this regard, I'd argue that the uBlue distros are one of if not the most reliable desktop Linux experience that's currently out there. You know most of the drill already (read: built-in rollback functionality, clean base system). But, the uBlue project has some aces up on their sleeves that (to my knowledge) are pretty unique:
  • "Ninety (90) days of image archives allowing for flexible rollback options." The images are stored online, so they don't even take space on your device.
  • Shared community maintenance, i.e. even if upstream has a rare fuck-up, you can trust on uBlue's maintainers to deal with it without you even noticing. For a recent example of this, we got this.
• Access to the AUR; while Distrobox can be installed on any distro, uBlue projects come with perks that make the whole experience better than it's found elsewhere. From quadlets that have been properly setup from the get-go so that you don't have to (additionally) maintain those distrobox containers, to even minor things like including Boxbuddy OOTB to make the transition as easy as they come.
• Setup for Gaming; It goes without saying that Bazzite is excellent for gaming. It's gaming-ready OOTB and includes (almost^[1]^) all the performance tweaks you'd wish.
• Setup and forget; I (almost^[2]^) don't know any other distro that better embodies this than Bazzite (and its other uBlue-relatives).

All in all, I think Bazzite is definitely worth a look. Consider installing it and setup to your heart's content. If -at any time during or after that process- you come across an insurmountable^[3]^ issue caused by its atomic/cloud-native/'immutable' nature, then you can check it off your list and look elsewhere.

1. CachyOS is still superior in this regard by doing a better job at inching out (literally) every performance gain out there.
2. Perhaps Endless OS does an even better job at this, but that would be a bad recommendation for all the other reasons.
3. Before giving up, if you wouldn't have done it by then, at least consider contacting the community through their Discord server. They're very helpful. FWIW, Bazzite has pretty excellent documentation as well. (Even if it ain't as exhaustive as the even more impressive ArchWiki. Granted, it doesn't have to be as expansive.)

Opensuse is absolutely not a set it and forget it distro. I get recommending your favorite distro to other users, but telling them it's an easy to use distro is absolutely false and sets them up for disappointment. You have to download the codecs yourself if you want to do so much as watch a video on firefox, for which you have to add a new repo. I've tried it for two days and I've already spent half of them fixing bugs or snapping back to a version that worked because it froze after sleeping before I even did anything with it other than log in.

It has been some time since I gave this a proper look. Do you use this yourself? If so, would you be so kind to share some of your experiences?

I never wanted a hobby, but rather an operating system.
That's exactly how I'm starting to feel. I was a "distro-hopper" when I was new to it, but now I just want shit to work. The only thing stopping me from pop is the state of their distro at current time. It feels like it's been abondened or something. I know they're busy with cosmic, but that's what it looks like. Also, I'm a kde plasma only person. I just can't use anything else.

AUR isn't the Arch package manager. It's a user-contributed package definition repo.