I installed kinoite on my laptop. Rebased to silverblue for a while to try out gnome, rebased to kinoite rawhide to check out kde plasma 6, then back to kinoite 39. I think a few minor settings had to be redone, but no real issues.

Sure, but in both cases it installs the flatpak version that distributes the codecs with the runtime.

Although, now that I say this, I did install the flathub repo on fedora, which does slightly undermine my point

I’ve used both, and the only third party repo I’ve enabled was tailscale. I’ve not had any issue with needing codecs in anything I’ve Installed through the discover app. I’ll admit that I don’t have an Nvidia card, so I don’t know how good support is ootb there (though iirc, at least openSUSE has a separate installer that include Nvidia drivers)

I think your best bet for this is one of the spinoffs of enterprise Linux: fedora or openSUSE. both are very solid ootb, and have starting configurations that are generally good.

The microos or silverblue variants respectively are really promising as well, but still have some caveats.

That’s the fun part of kalpa. Get to upgrade confidently. Though it does take a quick reboot to actually apply