lancalot

Yup; at least to some extent.

I don't know why, but openSUSE has had difficulty garnering popularity overall (aside from Germany).

A possible explanation, which also ties in to Fedora, is how both are the open source variants to corporate distros; SEL and RHEL respectively.

Arch and Debian are more community-driven by comparison.

For Fedora specifically, people couldn't regard it as anything but a testing bed distro; especially if you see how back2back they were with adopting new technologies like PulseAudio, systemd, Wayland, GTK 3/4, PipeWire etc. To be fair, openSUSE was the first to default to Btrfs and auto-snapshotting with Snapper*. Fedora was also facing competition from industry darling CentOS; similar code base, but a lot more stable.

Thankfully, since a couple of years now, Fedora has recognized that it's not cool to expect your user base to be sadistic. And together with the (unfortunate) downfall of CentOS, Manjaro and Ubuntu - Fedora has amassed a very healthy user base. And with how quickly Bazzite is becoming the face of gaming Linux (at least until Valve releases SteamOS), I don't think it has even peaked yet.

Historically, (at least for hobbyists/enthusiasts) Fedora and openSUSE have been a lot less popular compared to Arch, Debian and their derivatives. While not necessarily representative, Boiling Steam's chart -in which ProtonDB's data is used- does indicate to this as well.

Just my 2 cents.

My go to back in The Day was just Ubuntu because I was lazy.

So we have a bias towards Debian-based distros.

it’s not been playing nice with my Zen 4 desktop when it comes to ACPI power states (no sleep, doesn’t reliably turn the power off when i ask it to turn off, etc).

However, a newer kernel is definitely preferred.

is also something based on a normal distro that most people write guides for because I am a smoothbrain.

And finally, healthy access to documentation.

Based on the above, I would not pick:

• Debian Stable or any distro based on it. They ship with the 6.1 kernel, which launched only a couple months (January 2023) after the launch of Zen 4 (September 2022). I'm aware that access to newer kernels is possible. However, at that point, why even bother with Debian Stable to begin with?
• While both of Debian's Testing and Sid/Unstable branches have access to newer kernels from the get-go, distros that ship the latest kernel by default (e.g. Arch, Fedora, openSUSE Tumbleweed and their derivatives) are simply better for offering an end-user product.
• Arch, Fedora, openSUSE Tumbleweed and their derivatives are primarily dismissed for not being based on Debian. Though, the fact that they're more towards the rolling release side of things does play a minor role as well. By their very nature, they will change. Hence it's less ideal for "set-and-forget" setups.
• Pop_OS!' team seems to be primarily focused on delivering their upcoming COSMIC DE. For this reason, the distro has been in relative limbo. Therefore, I can't recommend it.
• TUXEDO OS is dismissed for being relatively unpopular. Lots of other Debian(/Ubuntu) derivatives are dismissed for various reasons.

Let's get to the actual recommendation, Linux Mint seems to be tailor-made for your use case:

• Based on Ubuntu, but without Snaps. While you can choose to use Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) instead, that one doesn't come with the latest kernel. So the recommendation is for (standard/vanilla) Linux Mint.
• Their forums are full with up-to-date and (relatively) well-written guides; while the excellent ArchWiki is arguably better, Linux Mint isn't a slouch either. Furthermore, as Linux Mint is very popular, you can simply expect to find solutions to most things that might come up.

I had something similar going on in Fedora Silverblue. I didn't really want to fiddle with it at the moment, so I just uninstalled whatever I got from ProtonVPN and the update went smooth afterwards. I hope someone else can point you towards a better answer.

Quite the contrary, the commit log on Github looks pretty healthy.

On what did you base the following:

it has not been updated since a while.

You can still edit it. Please consider doing so 😅.

should I be looking at any other distros?

From what I can tell,

• containerization is appealing to you; almost all of them employ this to some degree, but some more than others. More on that later.
• your preference goes out to (closer to) stock experiences rather than opinionated ones

I take it that you'd rather stick to the (relatively-speaking) more popular options. Not that popularity is necessarily good, rather not used by anyone else is bad.

Then, the following are worth looking at as well:

• NixOS; it's quite different to all the others, perhaps we may call it obtuse by comparison. But, it has been going at it for the longest; heck, it's older than Ubuntu. And, in my humble opinion, is one of the main inspirations for the others. But, contrary to the likes of Fedora Atomic or Vanilla OS, it doesn't go all-in on OCI. Therefore, it might not be as smooth of a transition.
• Guix System; the answer to "What if we had FSF-compliant NixOS, but with actually good documentation?" Jokes aside, this is a cool and underrated distro.
• openSUSE Aeon; relatively new still, but perhaps already offers the most secure OOTB experience. However, from what I can tell, in terms of transition to OCI, it doesn't strive to be very revolutionary (as of yet). Fedora Atomic seems to be a relatively significant (and IMO exciting) departure from traditional Fedora. By contrast, openSUSE Aeon seems more like a ~r~evolution with a (very) small r. Though, one may argue this is mostly due to maturity. Consider openSUSE Kalpa if you're feeling particularly adventurous.
• uBlue's base images; Aurora, Bazzite and Bluefin are built from these. These are vanilla images with only hardware enablement, codecs, other RPM Fusion goodies and more that anyone installing Fedora Atomic would want on their systems anyways.
• Create your own; See this link if you know how to write containerfiles. See this link if you prefer yaml (.yml to be more precise) instead. The previous links were more focused on Fedora Atomic, this link offers Vanilla OS' answer.

Other distros found on lists like this one didn't make the cut for various reasons; sometimes it's just because I haven't heard enough of it.

Do I need to shift my expectations of an immutable distro even more?

Uhmm..., I don't know exactly what your expectations are 😜.

FWIW, from what I gather, either (something based on) Fedora Atomic or Vanilla OS should be right up your alley.

Important elaboration. Much appreciated.

I'm mostly oblivious of what's required to run an ISP. But you mentioned servers yourself. Do you install Linux Mint on your servers?

Fair. Even if some may dismiss it as anecdotal (N=1), I do think it's valuable. Thank you.

with Mint when the next release you are more likely than not going to have to re-install

First time hearing this. Got anything to back that up?

Still getting the hang of Ubuntu, but I see a lot of comments on different posts in which a majority of them point to using Mint instead.

Ubuntu should be okay; it's not necessarily a bad pick. However, the community has been upset with some of its past decisions and (more recently) the implementation of its vision, i.e. their enforcement of Snaps. This has eventually led to our current situation in which it has become popular to hate on Ubuntu.

Would the best recommendation, be to switch to Mint from Ubuntu?

Personally, I've stopped recommending beginners to Ubuntu. This is primarily for how the above mentioned enforcement has lead to ~~broken~~ unintuitive interactions. However, if you've already started using it and are content with what you have, then the negative sentiment by itself shouldn't warrant a switch.

Though, granted, (I think) most Linux users have indulged in distro hopping; some have even made it their hobbies. So you shouldn't feel bad about switching either. Though I implore you to practice best practices while at it:

• Keep using your home base until you're certain of the switch.
• Don't nuke your home base to experience another distro. Make ample use of live USBs, VMs and dual booting instead.
• Try to understand the difference between the fundaments and the auxiliary when experiencing new distros; i.e., what is and isn't possible for you to import to your home base without outright switching.