EarlGrey

I tried openSUSE a few months back because I wanted to be more closely associated with SUSE than Red Hat (I had to update to a new RHEL release at work about a year ago and really hated some of the shit they were pulling).

Here's a list of issues I had:

• Was forced to not encrypt my system because for some reason the unlock screen rarely recognized my keyboard was connected and I couldn't input the password. I would have to turn on the computer, then reboot at least once to get it to work.
• The absolute confusion surrounding YaST when I tried it out. The community made it sound like the best thing about openSUSE, but also don't use it because it's terrible. Apparently it's being depreciated now. Don't want to learn an entire system just for it to be removed.
• I didn't experience any issues with this but it makes me nervous: Rolling Release + Required (for me) Community Repos. Meanwhile the standard release is slower than Fedora
• This one is a big "first world problem" but it really annoyed me. zypper, it's one of the longest package manager names, and i can't tab to autocomplete because there are other packages with similar names.

Now, all of these I problems I could probably fix. But it just wasn't really worth the effort when my main issue was: "The downstream company associated with my Distro did some dumb shit that doesn't really impact my system."

It's a bloody web browser.

How many people do you think actually sit down and do in depth research and analysis into the CEO's personal beliefs, employment history, and associations before deciding which piece of software they'll use to look at cat pictures?

You mentioned KDE as your preferred DE so I'd suggest the Fedora KDE spin. The Fedora team has been putting a lot of work into it lately and it's supposedly going to be upgraded to equal footing with gnome in the next Fedora release.

More customization = Higher chance something breaks.

Admittedly, chances are it's just something minor like your icons looking weird or transparency breaking, and it's not like it happens very often. However I have had it happen while I'm trying to focus on something and it's definitely an annoyance I could do without.

I like that I can customize on the off chance that I need to fuck with something. But defaults have been getting better and better so i've done it less and less.

I respect the effort he's put into right to repair, and agree (in general) with most of the points he makes about it.

But I also think he's an asshole and we need a better voice for the RtR movement. I've seen him get into fights and strawman people on reddit as corporate shills just for calling his attitude abrasive.

Bit of warning about KDE:

It is very customizable, but as a by product is also really easy to completely fuck up. The first time I used it (eons ago) I ended up removing the task bar and couldn't figure out how to bring it back or launch programs.

Just spend a bit of time reading up on it and you'll be fine though.

That sucks and all, but to be fair this is entirely on you. They sold you a DRM-Free file and you chose to not actually use it and to rely on their servers which you have no control over. This isn't a "DRM Free" issue.

Personal ownership means you take personal responsibility for it.

Fedora Silverblue.

Or really any immutable OS; they would have to go way out of their way to even edit system files, much less break the system. I just recommend Silverblue because gnome is really hard for an inexperienced user to break.