Hmm, now that I think about it…not a whole lot. I’ve been running it stripped down to the bones for so long I just got used to it being like that, but by default it does tick all the boxes.
I may have over-thought this one.

The print stuff does work.

I think “cups, just cups” pulls in enough to do airprint as is.

Yes Debian and use Flatpak for any app you need with a recent version. You can also use a Distrobox with Fedora or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Debian Testing if you need system packages that are more modern.

I dont know if Debian Testing is rolling, but Distrobox basically doesnt work with release distros if they need to system upgrade via a reboot, like Fedora. So Fedora Rawhide (dont) or Tumbleweed, Arch etc. are best.

When I tried it a year ago, printer setup failed with a permission error until I disabled the firewall, and I had to install a community repo by a random person and manually edit a text file to get airprint and airscan working. Half the YaST modules didn’t seem to do anything or work correctly, or duplicated KDE settings. That’s what I consider to be “annoying visible bugs”.
I also find their software selection to be limited (without said random community repos), and you can only update Tumbleweed from the command line. It felt like an unfinished mod of their flagship LEAP distro.

Which parts of those immutable distros are actually immutable?
To be more specific, on Debian I usually copy the Android Universal Debloater and other bins from Github into /usr/local/bin so they’re in my PATH. Can I still do that on those distros?

[Fedora] might require more setup with an Nvidia GPU

https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA

I only needed 3 Ctrl-Shift-V’s for that. Multimedia codecs are also about the same difficulty.

Debian. I had run such a stripped-down version for many years, I forgot it now has everything a beginner distro needs in the default install.

I didn’t consider Fedora cause last time I used it it did have a strong FOSS focus and put barriers in your way if you wanted non-free software.
Is that not the case anymore? Does it come with a GUI software center for rpm and flatpak? I’ve been on Debian and Arch so long my knowledge of other desktop distros is severely outdated.

bro literraly said no ubuntu you canonical shill

Why would mint be considered old but not ubuntu?

Performance issues/bloated disk usage and their forced use within Ubuntu.

The performance issues come from the fact that they run via virtualization. Similar to running a game on an emulator. This helps with compatibility, ie being able to run a Snap on an ARM computer when the native version isn’t available, but again, performance can take a hit.

Bloated disk usage is a result of each Snap including all dependancies with the base package. For example, if two Snaps rely on the same font, you get two copies of that font. If two native packages rely on the same font, you get one copy, and they share.

The forced usage literally boils down to this; on Ubuntu, typing “apt install example-package” actually runs the command “snap install example-package” (Edit: I should note this isn’t the case with all packages, but there are some pretty high profile ones on the list, ie Thunderbird). Canonical A; isn’t up front about this, therefor leading users into believing they are getting native packages when this isn’t the case, and B; make it frustratingly difficult to disable this behaviour and get only native packages

IMO if a company creates a product and then feels the need to force and trick their users into adopting it, that alone is enough to discourage me from ever choosing it over the alternatives.

I don’t have personal experience with them, but I keep hearing they’re very slow to start.
And I dislike them on principle, because Canonical tries to push snaps as the main distro-agnostic way of installing software, but they are hard-coded to only work with Canonical’s servers. It reminds me of the embrace-extend-extinguish strategy of Microsoft.