The closest to Mint in terms of:

• stability: only have breaking changes once every 6 months
• just-works-factor: shipping drivers and whatever proprietary code is necessary to have a smooth out of the box experience

That I know of, beside maybe OpenSUSE (have no experience with it) is Kubuntu 24.10. Yes apt will say weird things and you’ll want to uninstall snapd.

But Kubuntu 24.10, current latest, ships with Plasma 6.1. Current stable, Kubuntu 24.04 ships with Plasma 5 still.

But I assume you’re not a fan of the rolling release model like EndeavourOS (Archlinux based, KDE is the default). So if you want recent packages AND a versioned release model, that leaves only Fedora out of the distros I’m familiar with. They recently promoted the KDE version from a Spin to a full version beside the GNOME version.

But Fedora is much heavier on the FLOSS philosophy, and not as works-out-of-the-box as Mint or any Ubuntu flavor.

Debian isn’t, but it will take a long time for Plasma 6.3 to make it to Debian stable.

So yeah, I guess OpenSUSE may be your best bet EDIT: took a quick look, there’s a rolling release model of OpenSUSE called Tumbleweed. But you probably don’t like rolling release. And a versioned one called Leap. The current latest Leap version still ships Plasma 5 so that still isn’r nearly as recent as Fedora, which has had Plasma 6 in the last TWO versions.

Check the sidebar.

It’s about self-hostable alternatives to closed online software. It doesn’t say anywhere that the hardware has to be in your own home, just that it is about self-hostable software.

Similarly, !selfhosting@slrpnk.net is about self-hosting services, the hardware part is (even with the slrpnk folk) only a prefetence.

So feel free to discuss hosting your own services on a VPS here