Some parts look fine, but those Ravenholm scenes look terrible compared to Vanilla HL2. Completely kills the dim, gloomy vibe that defined it when every light source is basically a floodlight.
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 annoying 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.
I respect the effort he's put into right to repair, and agree (in general) with most of the points he makes about it.
But I also think he's an asshole and we need a better voice for the RtR movement. I've seen him get into fights and strawman people on reddit as corporate shills just for calling his attitude abrasive.
This is Gnomes biggest advantage to be honest. They have a singular vision of how they want their product to work and they aren't concerned with edge uses.
I enjoy elements of so many DEs but I keep coming back to gnome because it's just so well executed over the others.
Wait, THATS the picture he chose to have put up? The one with the weird tuft of hair sticking up in the back, where he looks like he's holding in a massive shit and has a series of tumor like lumps on his check?
I mean, fuck. If I were Elon rich I'd have Marvel's lead makeup artist on permanent retainer.
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.
Some parts look fine, but those Ravenholm scenes look terrible compared to Vanilla HL2. Completely kills the dim, gloomy vibe that defined it when every light source is basically a floodlight.