ProtonBadger

I don't use either but IMO people are far too worried about bloat, it's not some monster that'll drag you down. Unless you're extremely space constrained some extra packages on disk won't make any difference. And even on the slimmest install there'll be stuff you never use anyway.

LI

I agree, only release schedule really matters, package managers are easy to learn.. I don't think the AUR is that special either, I've always found everything I needed no matter the distro, but maybe I don't have exotic requirements.

I'm fine with most distros, though I don't bother with the fast rolling ones anymore, I did for a few years but I don't see the point for me. I'm happy with Fedora or an Ubuntu derivative and major updates are one command which is trouble free unless you've changed something in a non-standard way.

Now using Pop 24.04 as it's on a stable base and I code COSMIC stuff, oh and they update kernel/nvidia/mesa on a regular basis (I use hybrid Gfx, Intel iGPU and NV offload). I'll probably stick with PopOS or Fedora COSMIC spin/copr moving forward.

Use case for me is coding and gaming.

Assumptions are assumptions. The server is written in Rust, the idea is to be flexible with control and the optional UI. It has a big focus on Enterprise and things that were difficult with YAST are easier with Agama, such as unattended installation and using Ansible. For a simpler use case you can boot it up on your headless server and connect to https://agama.local/ in a web browser and continue the installation.

Relying on is perhaps too strong, but I enjoy operations like sort getting faster and I don't know how they've written cp but there's a cp alternative using async IO with io_uring that's almost twice as fast, I'm sure it'd interest people if such optimizations made it into coreutils.