Yeah, GuildWars2, Valheim, Pathfinder WotR, etc. those sort of games… So I’m a bit niche, some gamers have more issues than I.
I got a gnome-session installed for games that have problems with COSMIC but fortunately haven’t needed it for a while now.
I started with Slackware in the nineties, have been through Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu, Arch, Tumbleweed.
I could use anything really but these days my focus have moved; I kinda just want functional and well configured up front. Using Pop!_OS 24 alpha on my gaming/dev laptop, it works well/is well put together and I’m having fun writing COSMIC apps. I’m using Ubuntu on a few servers, I picked it many years ago and they’ve been through a number of painless upgrades.
GIMP 3.0 makes it a lot easier for devs to add functionality and they’re starting a UX working group.
But I find it usable, I’ve been using it weekly for a very long time. I’m happy to see development picking up though with more people joining.
It’s certainly safer though one can probably still do some damage in /etc, if determined.
There are some other differences, for example Pop!_OS while on a LTS base still gets regular updates of kernel, Mesa and Nvidia drivers which is nice.
I believe the EU redirected open source funding to LLM/“AI”. Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund on the other hand had its budget increased.
I started with Slackware in the late nineties. Have been through Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu, Arch, Tumbleweed. These days I just can’t be bothered, I just want to game and code and I prefer an out of the box well configured Ubuntu derivative, they also upgrade easily and have lots of application compatibility - mostly everyone provides .deb packages. I could also choose Fedora for these reasons.
So now on Pop!_OS 24.04. Pop is has a stable/lts base but still gets Mesa/Nvidia/Kernel updates on a regular basis. I use it mainly for gaming and Rust dev, writing some COSMIC applets as well.
COSMIC Alpha does still have problems with some games but not the games I play.