Really liked Mint, unfortunately the kernel was not new enough to support my 7900 XTX when I upgraded GPU so I ended up switching to Pop_OS which works fine as well.

The caffe runner had some versions that didn’t have the mouse focus problem, but it’s nice it works out of the box now.

I think the experience depends a lot on what ditros you’re using and your hardware configuration. I started out on Manjaro and that ran terribly for me, then i went on to Linux Mint which i liked a lot and that was solid, but since i got a new GPU i needed a distro with a newer kernel which made me switch to Pop!_os and that is also running great. But i won’t deny that audio was a bit flakey on Mint for me until i messed with it, seems solid on Pop though.

to me this is a feature rather than an issue, whenever a package is updated in the package repository it’s super convenient to just update them from the same place instead of having auto-updaters built into all applications on the system. i guess that’s a preference thing though.