Opensuse Tumbleweed is great, I've been daily driving it for ages on 3+ devices. It's a rolling release and has all the latest packages, but is extremely stable. It has a built in recovery tool called snapper that allows you to roll back to a previous state before an update on the off chance you get a bad one. Ive only had to use it a few times over the years but it's been great to have.

Really underrated distro imo

The closest to Mint in terms of:

• stability: only have breaking changes once every 6 months
• just-works-factor: shipping drivers and whatever proprietary code is necessary to have a smooth out of the box experience

That I know of, beside maybe OpenSUSE (have no experience with it) is Kubuntu 24.10. Yes apt will say weird things and you'll want to uninstall snapd.

But Kubuntu 24.10, current latest, ships with Plasma 6.1. Current stable, Kubuntu 24.04 ships with Plasma 5 still.

But I assume you're not a fan of the rolling release model like EndeavourOS (Archlinux based, KDE is the default). So if you want recent packages AND a versioned release model, that leaves only Fedora out of the distros I'm familiar with. They recently promoted the KDE version from a Spin to a full version beside the GNOME version.

But Fedora is much heavier on the FLOSS philosophy, and not as works-out-of-the-box as Mint or any Ubuntu flavor.

Debian isn't, but it will take a long time for Plasma 6.3 to make it to Debian stable.

So yeah, I guess OpenSUSE may be your best bet EDIT: took a quick look, there's a rolling release model of OpenSUSE called Tumbleweed. But you probably don't like rolling release. And a versioned one called Leap. The current latest Leap version still ships Plasma 5 so that still isn'r nearly as recent as Fedora, which has had Plasma 6 in the last TWO versions.

I can heavily recommend tuxedoOS, even on non-tuxedo machines. It's based on ubuntu but has snaps removed and only some small tuxedo apps installed :)