I’ve had a pretty good experience with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, with a pretty similar use case / criteria.

I’ve done my share of tinkering, and while I learned a lot, and enjoyed Gentoo, Arch, Debian, NixOS, and others (Mandrake, Ubuntu), I sometimes I just want get my work done…

With Tumbleweed, there are a few packages that you’d need to install for codecs, but that’s easily done via the CLI zypper package manager with a single command.

I’d definitely recommend checking it out - its been a solid daily driver for almost 3-years now with very few issues, and lets me focus on getting stuff done. I wonder if this is due to their QA build process (OBS)?

Anyway, good luck & have fun whatever you choose!

I’d be curious how well this approach translates to multi-lingual keyboard layouts. For english users, perhaps theres another benefit to non-QWERTY layouts (e.g. Colemak or Dvorak) after all? … and two factor authentication should remain helpful I presume. Especially physical key methods with no audible characters typed (e.g. Yubikey, Titan, etc.)

Just checked our major urban centre in Canada, and it’s around 1:450. As a comparison, that makes New Orleans (1:385) pretty well staffed.

Would be cool to find data covering major urban centres across the world for comparisons.