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Up until recently I have been running Debian testing. It worked for me for a while, but last ~4 months it stopped updating, most likely because debian team is in the middle of mitigation of year 2038 problem. Some packages still could be updated, so I tried to install one package. Because I didn't read output as thoroughly as I should have apt uninstalled many packages, one of them being xorg. I have found this situation as a reason to try other distros, so I burned OpenSuse iso and installed it.
Instalation process was generally nice, I didn't even had to recreate my user account, with option of importing it from old install, but having no ability to switch keyboard layouts on the fly is certanly is a choice.
One problem was insistance on creating separate /boot/efi partition, while Debian based systems never reqiered me to do so. At first I ignored warning that I could have problems. But on reboot I was greeted with message:
error: unknown filesystem. grub rescue> _
Trying to ls any filesystem resulted in either filesystem being unknown or in it being identified as ext2 and no further information provided. I could boot into the system by using instalation disk "boot into linux" option. Seeing this as my fuckup I decided to reinstall, this time nuking / partition and making space for /boot/efi partition. Sadly, this did not solve issue. This, alongside me not actually liking opensuse experience lead me to try out another distro.
As I coulnd't fit image in my DVD-RW I have started poking around in bios and found out that despite text on boot warning me that my BIOS doesn't have support for booting from USB drives, it actually does. So I dropped image onto my flashdrive and started installing.
There was no acount inport option like in OpenSuse, but it wasn't that important. The importatnt issue is that installer can sometimes just stall on some step, forcing you to reboot computer and start instalation from start. After realizing that borked OpenSuse installer remained in it's partition, I nuked it and reinstalled again. Sadly, it didn't help much, as I was greeted with
error: symbol `grub_verify_string' not found. grub rescue> _
Poking around with ls didn't reveal anything new compared to opensuse. In dispair I gave up and returned to Debian.
After twp bad installs I was afraid that I screwed up my pc for good, but after instalation Debian booted without problems. So now I guess I have to make peace with outdated packages and reliance on flatpak.