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.”

Rhythmbox has been my main music app for over 15 years now. Every now and then I’ll check out other options but I always end up back after a couple days.

I do wish they would give the UI some attention. Nothing major, just a few visual tweaks to bring it inline with modern Gnome (the alternative toolbar plugin is really close)

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.

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.

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.

Because it’s not “just a fancy interface”?

It makes the entire process from purchase to playing completely painless, on top of a large community of people, guides, achievements, etc. I think I’d maybe improve my performance by like…a fraction of a frame per second. Good trade off.

And as others have mentioned, Lutris does a good job if you don’t want steam.