[eddyb]

> So what are you using or recommending?

I am using KDE (aka Plasma5) in Wayland mode, on NixOS unstable.

I would not recommend NixOS, just like I mentioned, and I didn't really want to get into the weeds of why, but while Nix is something that more people should try out if they're already familiar with unfortunate asymmetries (e.g. "git's data model is really nice" vs "git's CLI has sharp edges and some workflows the data model implies are entirely unserviced") and/or like to play around with experimental unpolished software, I would maybe avoid it until they actually come up with a "more declarative"/"less computational" flavor for 99% of usecases.

I've used openSUSE in the past, and while YaST2 might be less relevant now, it was shocking how much similar things were outright lacking back then (a lot of this was pre-NetworkManager to be quite fair).

A lot of people like Arch, and if Debian/Ubuntu package management doesn't get in the way I suppose KDE Neon might be nice? (I keep forgetting KDE's Discover exists, it might also help with not dealing with package management directly)

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> FF crashing

Quite ironically, if it is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1743144 that's technically a gtk limitation (not only does it lead to the FF main thread having to poll gtk often enough to keep the Wayland connection from breaking, but when it does break it calls `_exit` so Firefox can't even do crash reporting, and they refused a patch to address this), and it can also happen for Chrome (which also uses Wayland through gtk AIUI).

If you want to check if it is the case, you can look in the logs (e.g. through `journalctl -o with-unit -r`) for "error in client communication".

> middle-click gets in the way a lot and can't be switched off

Are you talking about the feature controlled by System Settings -> Input Devices -> Mouse -> "Press left and right buttons for middle-click"? (that is, if you intentionally press both buttons, does it trigger middle-click?)

AFAIK that's off by default, but I am on a different distro and running KDE/Plasma 5.25.4 and maybe it changed at some point, or maybe it's specific to touchpads? (which I sadly can't test because I only have an older Nvidia laptop, that can't use the Wayland-compatible drivers, or rather I would have to switch to nouveau first and deal with that etc.)

> insists on chromium as default browser

I've had issues with this in the past, some apps provide their own configuration instead of going through XDG mechanisms, or at least have suboptimal defaults.

I would check the settings of the apps which cause chromium to start, and maybe play around with Flatpak/forcing the use of XDG Portal, but that might be too much to ask.