In this update:
The saga continues. Turns out the distro I initially tried is quite badly configured for what I want in general, but the other two I will subsequently trial will also have their own set of issues too!
Status: Still trying to figure out a good base setup via a VM. (Actual hardware support when I finally finish up enough ongoing projects to justify rebooting will be another matter later - and will likely require another round of figuring out if the problems are worth self-diagnosing vs just trying something else)
1) OpenSUSE - Continuing from last time...
Sigh... after a lot of hassle last time trying to get that first OpenSUSE VM up and tweaked, I soon ran into a rather major dealbreaker: That distro's *insane* Python setup which saw it using an ancient Python 3.6 version for "python3". I mean, that issue is able to be worked around if/when dealing with my personal projects, as I just create runner-aliases to get those to run with "python3.11" as they seem to demand. But for random third-party tools I use daily too (for which I need bleeding edge releases to maintain functionality with moving target servers, vs being able to rely on the often ancient package manager repo versions)? (Oh, and it had weird issues resuming from sleeping the VM - like never responding to input until I mashed the "power" button on the vm a bunch)... Yeah... that's not gonna work!
2) Manjaro
Hence, I was on the look for a new distro again, and chanced on Manjaro. (I know now that it has a bit of a polarising reputation, but let's just give things a fair chance first).
Impressions:
* Overall *VERY* positive. I like this one a lot.
* The theming stuff they've done a great job on. I really like that lighthouse desktop wallpaper they have by default (though it would be even cooler if it was one of those that switched between night/day versions based on time of day, as I know that RHEL / Rocky do with their Gnome ones)
* Also, they had installed by default a whole bunch of stuff that I had been manually installing for OpenSUSE
(Oh, interestingly too, they had ripgrep installed by default, but not fd)
* Startup + VM resume are also *much* snappier, and more professional looking
* I'm not sure if it's because Manjaro runs a more bleeding-edge KDE version, or if it was some of the tweaks + extensions they had applied, but the taskbar setup I was able to get there was *way* better than what OpenSUSE were offering (i.e. basically I only had to do minor tweaks to get the baseline I wanted, along with having a bunch more options to really dial in what I wanted too - options I later learned that KUbuntu doesn't offer either, so they may be limited to more bleeding-edge KDE versions?)
* Another thing it did well was figuring out the right resolution to display at (or allowing me to easily fix that)
* The defaulting to ZSH (or specifically, their customised one) was quite interesting:
* I really liked the nice coloured-graphic prompt with the path/prompt highlighted using solid block colours, and the execution time for each command shown on the right in a solid orange block. That's something I'm keen to try adopting / playing with more in whatever thing I move to eventually
* I'm not so convinced on it trying to give autocomplete hints for commands to run (as I usually have that type of thing turned off)
* What is good though is the syntax highlighting for when the commands I'm trying to run aren't setup
* The installer was generally nice (and had a cute mascot IIRC). The only quibble I had was the keyboard layout selection page, where I was confused by the decorative banner they showed (i.e. I thought it would be adapting to show me the layout that I'd selected, but it didn't). Was trying to use that to figure out whether the one it chose for me was actually a sensible one (i.e. I'm not sure if I've got a "Generic 102 / 104 / etc."???)
Downsides:
* Uses "pacman" as the package manager
* The defaulting to zsh did mean had to jump through some hoops to figure out how to add a path to my PATH environment variable, such that it would work everywhere. This did eventually result in me quasi-bricking my setup after shoving it into a ".profile" file that I then sourced from the ".zsh_profile" and ".bash_profile" files... only to have made a typo (i.e. ";" instead of ":" as a path separator), causing my to clobber the path after reboot, breaking the ability of the OS to load most things *except* for starting Firefox and/or going to one of the scary "virtual terminal" fullscreen windows (i.e. I still don't know if it was the VM or a weird hotkey combo on that OS that required some unusual key mashing to get there)
* Sound playback is MUNTED! I'm not sure how much of this is VM vs Hardware Support, but for whatever reason, the audio playback was glitchy, plagued by popping and random dropouts, and making the streaming-video playback on Firefox all stuttery. Yeah, this was a pretty big deal-breaker too...
3) KUbuntu
Yes, I eventually decided to give the old Ubuntu based ones another shot again, despite initially being wary of going for another one of these.
Haven't done much but:
* The first time installer workflow thing seems more polished than the rest
* The KDE taskbar tweaking settings were a *massive letdown* after trying to ones in Manjaro. Lots of the things I was looking forward to being able to dial in again were missing!
* But at least audio + video playback also worked very well on this one
* Being the largest that many folks default to, the packages should generally be the most supported... AND I have used Ubuntu + derivatives in the past, so am working in rather familiar territory again...
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