I'd also recommend Mint with Mate or Xfce. They have a German forum too.
Yeah, it's not feature complete
Well, as I said, it gives you the whole thing from scratch, in addition it doesn't fuck with your menus. Finally, and most importantly, maybe people don't like experimenting on their main machine.
You get the whole experience including installing your necessary software
While that's encouraging, I would still make a full backup of my data and have a plan to replace the drive while I investigated further.
Yeah, I'd be checking the smart stats on my drives and doing a full data backup if I didn't already have one.
Flouncing off is about the drama of leaving, not the time served before doing so. You can be in a role for decades and then flounce off!
It works just fine on my laptop - Intel, openSUSE
It mostly works fine on my desktop - Nvidia, endeavourOS
Since the explicit sync fixes, the only problems I have are janky scrolling in Firefox / Librewolf and a couple of bugs with panels. They are annoying enough that I use X11 on the desktop.
SLE is a fork of factory. Leap is based on SLES with community additions, it's why SUSE changing to ALP and dropping desktop support in the new version was such a big thing for the future of Leap.