Wonder how much of this relates to SUSE? How “normie-tolerant” is that? I’ve been printing for years without any issues for instance, and have a HP printer that used to hate my linux OS with a passion.

What you say describes my experience 10 to 15 years ago, not my experience today. Compare the settings dialog in KDE Plasma to the windows settings dialog for instance. Or should I say myriad of Windows settings dialogues.

What was difficult in your experience?

Huh odd, I guess it depends quite heavily on the system? Just to check I cleaned my build folder and am building now, ~700 files that take around 5 minutes to compile. I don’t notice a thing, CPU (Ryzen 7 7700X ) is fully maxed out. I know that I do notice it on my laptop, but there reducing from 16 to 12 or even 14 is enough. Having to reduce to 4 is very different from what I experience. Currently on manjaro, the laptop has ubuntu.

If you don’t want compilation to take all cores, use one or two cores less for the compile. I frequently compile C++ code, almost always I just let it max out 100%, haven’t been really bothered by the lag. When I’m in a teams meeting for instance it can cause noticable lag so then I do ninja -n 8 or ninja -n 12 and problem solved.

Cross-platform and performant, are there options besides C++ and rust?

I was very surprised yesterday to find out that Unreal Engine now offers native linux builds as well as linux targets. Works flawlessly too. So with all the hate linux seems to be getting from them from what you read in the occasional blog post, they must have devs working only on this support.