For example Mint has skype from an APT repo. This means users run creepy proprietary Microsoft garbabe. Not as a Flatpak and not on Wayland, meaning it can do whatever it wants, autostart, run in the background, record everything, scan everything.
Dont ask yourself if it works, but how it works.
but there is no too late at this point.
There is, as developing Wayland, Pipewire, xdg-desktop-portal support etc. takes time and testing.
XOrg may be officially maintained, but it is extremely insecure by design and also RedHat is not fixing that.
This is the dead deadline. And just because that is the point when even the last, paid developers will jump off the XOrg ship.
I would call the time toward that point “perfectly working”. It is basically life preservance.
less an issue with atomic desktops
Updates are really stable (dont have much experience with traditional fedora) but you will still get all the new changes that may surprise you.
Ubuntu base is optional. Debian base also works fine
I wouldnt use either. They ship outdated packages which is not a good model.
I think OpenSUSE Slowroll is a reasonable model, ship stuff that comes out, but wait a bit until the Tumbleweed people have tested it.
Fedora is not bleeding edge either, thats what Fedora Rawhide is for.
But using 3 years old outdated packages for basic stuff, like mesa, or the kernel, or… xscreensaver ;D
For sure it is nice for servers that have one purpose, but general desktops, I dont think so.
The biggest problem is that the Distro makes the cut, not the devs. Stability is fine, but if there is no ESR version of a product (like Firefox ESR, Thunderbird ESR, the LTS Kernel etc) you will just freeze packages of random versions.
If you then dont backport fixes, like with xscreensaver, you get these issues.