So, after Debian Stable disappointed me by crashing Wayland and Baloo on a fresh install with KDE, I decided to try out OpenSUSE Tumbleweed:

• The installer is awesome. I’ve never seen such a great interface for choosing which packages to install before.
• 8 seconds of Grub timeout seems a bit much.
• The Desktop looks and feels like the “engineer’s distro” it claims to be. The wallpaper, splash screen, login screen and theming look and feel beautiful and professional.
• Printer and scanner setup was awful. YAST doesn’t find my printer (which Debian did and set up printing and scanning automatically). The KDE printer setting fails to load, claiming it is “forbidden” even after prompting me for the root password. Googling the issue, I disable the built-in firewall, which changes nothing. At this point, I take drastic measures, uninstall YAST and the firewall so nothing can get in the way of the usual setup process. I download the drivers from the manufacturer and try manual settup with Cups, which also fails with a permission error. I try adding my user to the lpt and lpadmin groups, which does nothing. The documentation for setting up scanners only covers USB-attached devices, not those in a network. I find out that for automatic setup, I need cups-airprint and sane-airscan. The latter is only available through a user’s home repo, which the docs specifically tell you not to do. I do it anyway, and the printer/scanner finally shows up configured correctly.
• Web Video doesn’t work out of the box. I follow the docs to activate the Packman repo and install the necessary codecs, despite the warning of a lemmy user that this broke their KDE desktop. I still don’t know if it makes a difference whether I install all codecs from Packman or only those that aren’t available in the main repo. There’s nothing about it in the docs.
• Package management is obviously not optimized for Tumbleweed, but for LEAP. Why is the YAST Update GUI installed by default if you are supposed to only use zypper? Why does zypper throw a warning every time I do zypper dup, even though that’s the only way you’re supposed to update? To get the packages I need for normal laptop use, I have to activate a couple of additional repos. The docs warn you that not all repos are compatible with each other, without going into detail. So I guess, there’s a risk of instability, but I have no way of knowing how big it is. Also, I’m still not sure what zypper refresh does. dup seems to work without it, and zypper warns me when a repo is out of date, so it must have some way of checking that without refreshing. For now, I just do “zypper dup && zypper refresh” every time, like on Debian. I don’t know if there’s a good reason why some repos are set to auto-refresh “no” by default. The docs don’t tell me.
• For spotify, I tried out spotify-easyrpm, which builds an installable RPM from the official snap, and adds a systemd service for automatic updates. REALLY great idea and I was excited when I found what it does. Only it failed to install some needed dependencies, and after installing them manually, the Spotify client opened a black window.
• On the other hand, I was impressed how much thought was put into packaging so your software is ready for use after installation. Installing flatpak pulls in a package that automatically enables the flathub repo, for example. And I love that updates come in “mini releases” that went through automated testing as a whole, instead of on a package-by-package basis.

My summary: You can feel that this is a distro made by Germans. It’s a lot more complex under the hood than for example Debian, with special tools built in where others rely on simple config files, and a lot of thought put into it.
But also quite a few parts that feel overengineered, and an even stricter free software policy that Debian has nowadays. My main issue with it is lack of good documentation online. What is there is not all collected in one place, a bit spotty and sometimes contradictory.
After setting it all up and learning about its quirks, I’ll stick with it however. Despite its issues, it feels like a well-made distro, and the combination of a tested rolling release with easily accessible and granular user repos and its own build system are unique.