I cannot speak for “all distros” but I know from experience that this statement is not true. There are also numerous “retro” YouTube channels where you can watch people burn DVDs to install Linux on older hardware. I have seen at least one of those in the past month.
Finally, the ISO file format is the native format of optical media like DVD. When you use an ISO to create a USB stick, you are starting with a DVD image (typically). If it is a valid ISO, you can burn it to a DVD and go.
In terms of “slow”, is it possible that expectations have simply changed and we have forgotten how slow things were back in the day. DVD throughput that is working fine is going to feel slow to us today. Just like we are no longer super impressed that we can store 4.7 GB on a disc.
That was it for me. I was actually a KDE user way back in the KDE 2 and 3 days. I found KDE 4 unusable. KDE 5 never won me over. But I have been using Plasma 6 on Wayland and am perfectly happy with it.
My preferred DE is XFCE. However, over the past few months, I have moved most of my work to a new distro and made the jump to Wayland. Both of these have landed me on KDE.
KDE has by far the most complete, and therefore painless, Wayland support.
KDE has been great to use honestly. I mostly do not think about it which is what I want in a DE these days. The configurations I need are there when I need them and not in the way when I don’t. KDE uses more memory than XFCE but not nearly as much as Firefox or Chrome.
I dislike modern GNOME but KDE has been great and, at this point, I feel like it is the best option on Wayland.
In my experience, just using both the stable and LTS (Long Term Support) versions of the kernel avoids 99% of issues.
In the last two years, I have had drivers fail after an update twice. In one case, my laptop WiFi no longer worked (potentially huge problem as it does not have Ethernet). In another case, the webcam stopped working and I need it everyday. In both cases, I booted into the LTS kernel and was back up and running in under two minutes. In both cases, I tried the more up-to-date kernel a week or two later and found that things were working again. If I only had the one kernel, both of these would have been major issues. With two, they were nothing.
Out-of-date software versions cause more issues in my experience than too new versions cause on Arch. As does not having to work around software missing from the repos. In practice, I find Arch very stable and reliable.
EndeavourOS is almost indistinguishable from Arch once installed. On that we agree.
The idea that getting it there has no value is something we can disagree on. You do not have to agree with me. That is not a problem.
I just installed EndeavourOS on a 2020 T2 MacBook Air the other day. All the hardware worked flawlessly after the point and click install. Read the vanilla Arch instructions for that hardware sometime.
EndeavourOS offers a path to installing Arch that is painless and offers a high chance of success. It configures the system well. It is easy to recommend.
Same kernel as Arch, 99.9% of the software is installed from the same repos. AUR is enabled out of the box. Just works. No brainer.
And even though Arch only adds about a dozen optional packages on top of Arch, some of them are pretty useful.
An even better question might be, what is present in Fedora that is not also found in Debian?
Is it RPM? Because RPM was Free Software and GPL licensed for over a decade already when the Arch Linux project was started. And of course, RPM is used in many other distros including the apparently totally European driven and unfettered SUSE distro.
Based on your write-up, one of the Arch based distros is likely your best bet. My strong recommendation would be EndeavourOS. It is awesome.
If you use EOS, install both the current stable kernel and the LTS one. Use current day-to-day. In the very rare instance that you have a kernel or driver issue, boot into LTS.
Fedora is a great distro. As a non-American, I would say that you do not need to be so focussed on either IBM or the “American” control over Fedora.
1 - Fedora has a great community and a strong commitment to Free Software. Independence from Red Hat’s commercial agenda is the very reason it exists.
2 - Even in a worst case scenario, you are not locked into Fedora and switching is low risk and easy. There is little downside to enjoying Fedora now even if something was to happen later (however unlikely).
3 - modern Linux distros are almost all built from the exact same base elements. Fedora is really no more exposed than anything else.
4 - Red Hat is a driving force behind half the technology at the heart of whatever distro you will end up on including SystemD, Wayland, Pipewire, Glibc, GCC, and the Linux Kernel itself. To repeat point number 3, you are no less exposed to the influence of IBM/Red Hat on Ubuntu or even Arch.
I mean, you could use something like Chimera Linux that avoids SystemD, GCC, and Glibc. But you would still be using Wayland, Pipewire, and of course the kernel. And Chimera does not sound what you are looking for.
I would recommend EOS but I would not avoid Fedora for the reasons you cite.
Many of us would not be able to declare our love for the US—certainly not convincingly. Being out into a position to do so could lead to an escalation.
This is exactly the kind of risk that some of us hope to avoid. It is totally wrong to say that there is no risk even if you “keep your shit together”.
The entire point of a Memorial Day or a Remembrance Day is to honour the sacrifice and to lament that it was necessary. Simpleton Trump thinks it should be about celebrating victory. It is hard not to feel bad for somebody that is so incomplete as a human being.
Hardware issue?
I cannot speak for “all distros” but I know from experience that this statement is not true. There are also numerous “retro” YouTube channels where you can watch people burn DVDs to install Linux on older hardware. I have seen at least one of those in the past month.
Finally, the ISO file format is the native format of optical media like DVD. When you use an ISO to create a USB stick, you are starting with a DVD image (typically). If it is a valid ISO, you can burn it to a DVD and go.
In terms of “slow”, is it possible that expectations have simply changed and we have forgotten how slow things were back in the day. DVD throughput that is working fine is going to feel slow to us today. Just like we are no longer super impressed that we can store 4.7 GB on a disc.