Longtime Mint stickler here, never developed a taste for any other distro schools (Arch, Fedora, other *buntus and Debians). But tried out MX after a long period of deferring and I am genuinely blown away. This distro has everything I could have ever ask for - Debian stability coupled with advanced hardware support (with more recent zen kernels and drivers), a solid opinionated Plasma DE setup that is both minimalist and all-encompassing at the same time, and a full stock of sensible and pragmatic utilities to cover the boring stuff.
Mint's relative lethargy at migrating to wayland has been increasingly becoming a sore point due to the sheer practical difference it makes (especially in terms of multi-monitor HiDPI and fractional scaling, in addition to security and performance). MX KDE has all that covered and then some. It's the first time I had to genuinely stretch to find any fault. The only complaint I have is that they aren't letting me post this testimonial in the MX forum because it doesn't accept anon-aliased emails for logins.
Fedora Atomic and its derivatives (like Bazzite and its uBlue-siblings). I wouldn't be surprised if the same applies to NixOS and other (paradigm-wise/philosophically-)related projects.
Hm, immutable distros change the game quite a bit. I don't see how Debian could match that without introducing an immutable version of Debian, so it's not really something that the people in charge of the upgrade process can solve.
We already have container images for use with
bootcof many non-Fedora distros (including Debian). This is (part of) the groundwork I alluded to earlier. So it's definitely possible. But I agree with you: it will only happen after the people in charge are interested in solving this.And even if I'm being (very) optimistic, I can only see an officially supported bootc-variant of Debian come into fruition if it's necessarily better than the alternative; kinda like how systemd replaced the default init on most distros. And, even then, I only expect it to live alongside traditional Debian. As I'm simply unsure whether all of its kinks will eventually be ironed out. Only time will tell...