Another vouch for EndeavourOS being Arch but with less hassle, I have installed and maintained for years both Arch and Gentoo and while I think those two are the best way to experience and learn Linux, I don't have as much time anymore, so I was trying out fedora for a while (left because some package lagged just a bit much for my preference; Emacs and some compilers/runtimes mainly) I wanted back into some cutting edge rolling-release distro.

I prefer Arch over debian testing and opensuse thumbleweed because of popularity and gaming, there is bigger chance that if a game has problems, these have been found out on arch especially with the steam deck technically increasing the user base of gamers on Arch.

EDIT: NixOS sound interesting because it might be even less time commitment to maintain I think(?), but the initial learning curve would be more time investment that EndeavourOS is since I'm very acquainted with how to upkeep and Arch system that I daily drive.

It ships with both Wayland and Xorg, but Wayland is the default.

For 3 days lol, no breakages at all. I've switched from arch after using it for several months but now I just want stable enough distro with latest plasma and btrfs snapshots without hassle and decided to give tumbleweed a try.

To Gentoo users: what I'm supposed to do about the upgrades of browsers if I don't have a great CPU? Do you install alternative/smaller browser or compile them on night? I feel like there are too many sites that require Firefox/chromium to run functionally, I'm pretty sure Firefox (the only one I tried) accounted for over 1/3 of the compile time with its dependencies.

Maybe there is some setting, preferred hardware, that makes the compiling a bit easier. Outside of NixOS (might want to learn) and Arch (currently using), Gentoo (know how to use but too much compiling made me not install on new PC) is the only distro I'd like to daily drive, so would be cool to get some advice on it.

Hmm... interesting you mention terminal really slow to open up. I still experience this also - the first time I open a terminal (only), and only if I try to open it shortly after I boot the machine. I've tried several times to find out why this is, but without success (without a terminal it's hard to find out what's blocking the terminal...)

The other thing I dumped was the latest Ubuntu Studio Chromium install, because it installs a snap, which is laggy to fire up, which also drove me crazy. I use the Mint chromium build now, which is a real native build, not a snap, and works great.

For me it's a case of "if it ain't broke don't fix it". I don't get the point of switching to snaps when apt packages worked perfectly fine.

And in my experience it's actually worse than APT. Installs/updates are slow, as is app startup, system integration features need extra work, ...