My top picks currently for distros that support KDE are the following:

• ArchLinux
• Debian
• Fedora KDE
• OpenSUSE Leap
• OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

For your use case (Nvidia, Wayland preferential), the better choices among these will likely be the rolling releases (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, ArchLinux) or 6 month point releases (Fedora KDE). Debian and OpenSUSE Leap are solid choices for LTS, but given the state of Nvidia and Wayland, it’s best to use the latest releases of KDE and the proprietary Nvidia drivers. If you switch GPUs to AMD or Intel in the future, you should have no issues using any of the distros listed.

To put points against some of the distros your contending list:

Many of the direct Ubuntu-based distros tend to have a certain level of lesser quality in packages (such as many releases never end up pushing bugfix patches that get patched in many other distros including Debian). Additionally, there is no guarantee that Ubuntu-derivative distros that don’t directly source from Ubuntu software repos may have breakages when using PPA repos or developer-distributed .deb packages.

I’m sure you’re aware of this bit as well, but the mainline Canonical-maintained distros (Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc.) rely heavily on Snap: a containerized application platform similar to flatpak, but with no freedom of choice of package sourcing. Every Snap package will be pulled from Canonical’s proprietary publishing platform. A lot of derivative distros (Linux Mint, Pop! OS, etc.) end up stripping out Snap from default installations and removing package redirects, recommends for Snap.

For Arch derivatives (Endeavour, Manjaro, etc.), don’t expect to be able to use AUR packages without issues unless your derivative directly sources from the ArchLinux repos. Many AUR packages explicitly expect the latest packages, which some derivatives defer updates to, causing breakages.

In particular, Manjaro has a track record of poor maintenance and questionable choices (recommending users to roll back system clocks after forgetting to renew TLS certs, shipping outright broken versions of Asahi Linux in order to tout support for Apple hardware, DDOS’ing the AUR, etc.)

Debian Sid (the unstable (rolling) variant Debian) is an option, but it’s really not recommended for end-use, and mostly only for testing.

To put points against some of the distros on my recommendation list:

Fedora explicitly only ships with FOSS software. This does mean that initial NVidia driver setup is more involved compared to most distros. The process shortlist is initial boot with nomodeset, install rpmfusion repos, and then install the NVidia drivers from RPMFusion-nonfree. Once that is done, the proprietary drivers should be installed and all configurations necessary should already be made. Simply rebooting should allow using the system accordingly.

Installing ArchLinux specifically expects some knowledge of the inner workings of a Linux system. Modern Arch live images do come with Archinstall: a utility that assists in getting an installation from configuration options. In general, an Arch install is a more involved process. ArchLinux also expects that you read from the news page before pushing updates to your system. While this kind of practice can also be true for many other rolling systems/point releases between feature upgrades, it is fairly imperative that due diligence and backups are taken on Arch systems when updating.

For the most part, you won’t be able to escape Unix-like paradigms when using Unix-like systems. Notably, users have to exist in some form. You don’t necessarily need to give them passwords for the frontend signage, but they need to exist. The shortlist of setting up cage would be:

• install your favorite server distro of choice
• Have a rootless, sudoless user available to use
• install cage and your app(s) of choice
• Add autologin for the user and edit the user’s BASH profile to autolaunch cage
• Attend to any other backend setup (remote access, only allowing tty1 to exist, etc.)
• reboot

It’s not quite a few clicks, but this can in contrast also be fully automated trivially if it’s something you need to setup more than once.

In what way does Windows fulfill a ‘kiosk’ display mode better than Linux for you? Are you looking for permanent installations or just temporary lockdown to a single application. One of the more modern and straightforward methods currently is using cage.

Cage lets you spawn a Wayland compositor from command-line (or via system service, obviously) that launches either a singular or multiple exclusively-fullscreen applications.

A couple things to check using a quick bash script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

cd /sys/class/power_supply/BAT*/
echo "Charge cycles: $(cat cycle_count)"
printf '%s\0' 'Health: ' &
bc <<< "scale=3; ($(cat charge_full) / $(cat charge_full_design)) * 100"

That should print out the wear cycles the battery has endured and its reported capacity over design capacity. If your battery has less than 1000 cycles and the health reported from the battery is less than 80%, it might be best to contact Framework for warranty replacement as the battery is likely defective.

As I found out recently myself, you should almost always set the minimum amount of reserved memory for the iGPU on modern hardware. The reserved memory is just that— reserved. The kernel still dynamically allocates memory for GPU usage as needed on iGPUs.

Windows does have memory compression, though you can’t really change the algorithm or how aggressive it is. AFAIK it is just a toggle of on or off.

I just did some testing in the past hour or so and did a portable install from scratch using the Fedora Workstation 39 iso. I’m not exactly sure what your hardware detection issue would have been, but I can say that Anaconda could detect both a USB flash drive and an external hard drive I had plugged in.

Going with the USB flash drive, I did skip using the automatic partitioning and went for using blivet to do my work. I did format the drive beforehand as I have always had issues with that drive properly accepting various partitioning commands (the installer no exception as tested). I did reserve a partition for a shared storage filesystem, but didn’t actually give it a filesystem here.

In blivet, here is a sample of the kind of partition schema I was talking about (something that might be helpful to OP or anyone else that wants to try this setup):

I was able to then complete the install as normal and boot into the finished USB drive. I noted a small non-fatal complaint from grub on boot, but I imagine this is fixed with updating the system. All systemd units boot without failure and I am able to get the system working with minimal issue. The only real issue I could note is that the installation is very sluggish (due to it being on a flash drive rather than an external ssd or some other more suitable media). After booting, I then opened Disks and added the missing exfat (or NTFS) filesystem I reserved a partition for. The reason I didn’t do this in blivet during install is because the option doesn’t actually exist to make an exfat fs in the tool.

Hopefully, this comment is helpful toward getting such a setup working.

EDIT:

Something I did notice with GRUB on Fedora Workstation 39 is that by default, the menu will not show unless pressing escape on boot. There is a useful AskUbuntu post that explains in detail how to access the grub menu and how to change it to behave in a better fashion for a multiboot system.

Ah, that would put a bit of complication into things. If you want to actually accomplish this though, you should largely start with the same steps as a standard system install, using a second USB flash drive to write the distro onto the external SSD, leaving enough space to build the rest of the partitions you need. If you intend to make a Windows-shared partition (exfat, fat32, or NTFS), it is probably best to put that partition either first or just behind the EFI partition so that Windows systems won’t have a hard time finding it. Exfat or NTFS would be a better choice for this type of partition.

I would still generally recommend keeping the live distros on a separate bootable drive, but you can size and reserve dummy partitions after the rest of your normal dual-boot installs and shared data partitions for live installers to overwrite. There is likely going to be some experimentation with getting the OS bootloader (such as on GRUB provided by Fedora in this case) to pick them up and add them as boot entries. You should (depending on the live image) be able to dd write them to the ending partitions reserved for the image for as long as the partition is sized equal or larger than the ISO image’s size (it’s best to give at least a few blocks of oversize on the partition when writing ISO’s directly).

Edit: In a proper Fedora install, you should almost never need to disable selinux or set it to permissive unless you know why you don’t want it.

For the longest time reading this post, I didn’t catch that you were setting up a simple dual boot for an internal SSD and thought with using tools like Ventoy you were making a multiboot portable install.

You are obscenely overcomplicating this. Your current approach is almost completely wrong to getting a functional multiboot system that passes secure boot and everything else.

Quite literally, bootstrapping from windows can use Rufus or ventoy on a USB stick to dump the ISOs on. Then boot into bios from the USB EFI entry. From there, simply install Fedora (no VM necessary). You’ll get Fedora installed in a GPT/EFI configuration (if you formatted your drive for install). If doing manual partitioning to leave space or do other configurations, format the drive to GPT. If multibooting, you may want to expand your EFI partition beyond 512MiB for multiple distros.

For other Linux OS to install alongside, you can then install them in the free space. Another comment mentioned to not install a bootloader on the secondary OS(es), which is generally a good idea.

For Tails, it is not meant to be installed on an SSD. It is best to use it on a flash drive.

Overall, a majority of your issues stem from the following:

• trying to use live distro images as an actual OS install
• using Ventoy as your bootloader
• using legacy MBR partition tables instead of GPT without expressed need for them
• Using virtualbox in general to provision bare metal hardware (changes need to be made in your VM software of choice to get EFI booting to work)

I’d argue your conclusion of people not switching to Linux because you found it too hard is almost entirely not because of any issue on Linux, but the factors you wedged yourself into on a modern x86 PC due to your methods in accomplishing your goal.

The username release is quite recent for those not participating in beta versions of Signal.

There are not many Android phones that actually let you flex the open source benefits of AOSP. Android as it is packaged on many devices is not open source, and nor are the devices willing to fully let you install what you want. Ironically some of the only choices you have with the highest degree of freedom are from google.

VideoLabs is made up of many of the same contributors of VideoLAN, including Jean-Baptiste Kempf themself. It is arguable that this is in fact Unity banning VideoLAN’s VLC bridges for media playback in Unity.