Just a few words, Tumbleweed is great but fast moving – if you can’t find something in the Wiki ask at the Forum, there is a bunch of helpful people.

My Experience with Gnome and KDE was good, but i use Xfce for a while and do most common things like installing, upgrades and so on using the Terminal. Looks like Myrlyn is a good GUI Option for this too, but i can’t say anything about it from own experience.

Oh, and yes, snapper has got you covered if something goes wrong during upgrades. Just don’t forget to do backups, just in case.

Whatever you do, have fun.

Oh okay, sounds weird indeed and not normal. I use Tumbleweed and its mostly smooth sailing, after a steep learning curve for me. You should be good with Mint, there is not much difference between Distributions for Causal Gaming. Newer Hardware can be a show stopper with not so up to date Distributions.

Out of interest, which openSUSE distribution did you use?

healthcare

Hmm, i can’t help you with debian. I had vala app menu working with Xfce also in the past, but don’t use it anymore.

vala panel appmenu could be a option.