I usually go for gnome regardless of distribution. I have old laptop that i use to try distributions occasionally.
Same hardware, same desktop, same encrypted drive, same BTRFS choice, different responsiveness at times.
Systems heavy on flatpak tend to be noticeably slower.
I had sluggish experience with SUSE. Updates were slow. Installation was very slow.
Starting apps was not as snappy.
Promise of snapshots was great, but not unique.
Overall slower than my regular distro experience killed it for me.
I simply asked myself: will it bug me every time I use the laptop? The answer was yes, and decided to end it.
Installer is a big part.
2nd biggest part is how system is configured.
Debian is not afraid to create its own version of default configuration. Take some mail software as example.
Arch on the other hand is most likely just going to ship original application configuration.
Debian might be nice and easy, until configuration change is necessary. Suddenly, original application documentation doesn’t apply. Debian documentation may be obsolete or absent. And that is the beginning of reading all of the configuration files. Normally, it is not a problem until something like email system configuration is necessary.
That’s when Arch philosophy of making fewest changes to software comes to shine. Original documentation usually works and applies well.
Years ago major upgrades and to lesser degree even minor upgrades made me to give up trying to keep installation running. I don’t even remember if it was Red Hat or Debian.
Eventually I realized, that I like running newest version of Desktop and I ran into cases of getting frustrated with lack of newer versions, which had fixes for issues I ran into. Then I realized that best wiki was not a snapshot distribution.
In the end I tried rolling distribution and remain happy for years.
Debian or derived distribution is easiest to get google help for and it is the simplest choice for me, when running on the cloud.
Although, Alpine is pushing through containers quite forcefully.
KDE was far less stable for me compared to Gnome. In the end, my patience with KDE lasted for 1 week.
KDE is more exiting and familiar, but it had no tangible advantage in the end for me.
hardlink
Most underrated tool that is frequently installed on your system. It recognizes BTRFS. Be aware that there are multiple versions of it in the wild.
It is unattended.
Someone explained it to me this way:
If knife is a newest feature, then
Any snapshot distribution by definition is on bleeding edge.
Any rolling release is by definition on the cutting edge.