Most recently I got a 2022 Lenovo Legion 5i and tried tumbleweed on it. Installed drivers according to documentation and I get a blank screen on boot now. I alt F2 my way to a terminal and startx to get in but now my background is mysteriously a black screen. I fart around with kernel arguments to try and fix the issue but give up after awhile. Install arch as distributed by endeavouros with KDE de and install using their installer. Works without issue and usb-c display port works great.

To be fair stock mint with xanmod and 5.15 both failed to work properly with the driver. Could not dim the screen. Apparently an issue with cinnamon.

I assume GNOME would work fine but GNOME working fine is an issue for me because I am a child of the 80s and like computers provide me nostalgic feelings of a start menu and desktop regardless of the fact I could use some keyboard shortcut powered DE and be significantly cooler. Coolness has given way to comfort and I prefer Cinnamon or KDE in that order.

I find it to be a perfectly good desktop experience using KDE but I don't play games so can't comment on that. The only driver you typically need to install is the Nvidia one. Talking of that, Nividia drivers can cause the occasional problem when updating because they don't always keep up with the pace of kernel changes. At least you can rollback to a working state easily. On my Intel only machine tumbleweed has been utterly reliable and I haven't needed the rollback facility of snapper and btrfs. It's definitely nice to have though!

On Reddit, I used to see complaints about zypper being a slow package manager and to be fair, when updating it does feel slow. However, I've been using it long enough that I can't compare it to other package managers.