Linux Mint is worse in almost every aspect except usability for beginners.
How this can be true as Mint is just Ubuntu + their (Mints’) own additions?
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Hm, modern era Einstein? 
UI or cli?
Should be, but this is not always the case. In fact much more apps there are outdated than uptodate.
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I should said often and not always. 
Both. openSUSE Tumbleweed is the Linux distro that just works most of the time. Bug fix from the latest apps, packages, etc.? It’s there. Update issue (never have one myself)? There’s snapper that makes use of Btrfs snapshot pre-configured in place, there’s also GUI in YaST for that. I really like the experience here overall. The only issue in openSUSE is app support that’s still behind Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch.
It’s not a better choice IMO. If you don’t mind the dependency hell issue and compatibility tinkering sometimes, it might work for you. But if you just want to use your PC to do your works, you’ll be disappointed.
However, it’s useful if you want to clone your app, or want to use the app that’s not compatible/available for your distro, for example, Portmaster would freeze and unusable if you install it directly on openSUSE, so you install it using Distrobox with Ubuntu image..
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@archerallstars Ive heard about openSUSE Tumbleweed but never tried it myself
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If your workflow allows it, and you don’t mind some hiccups between PackMan and openSUSE repos, give it a try and you won’t look back 
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From my experience with opensuse, usually whenever there was a conflict with Packman I would just wait a day or two and it would resolve itself. Similar to Fedora with the rpmfusion mesa vaapi driver conflicts
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@archerallstars not sure about my work-env, but will test it on my home laptop for sure (first as a vm and later we will see how it goes)
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X11 and not using Ubuntu’s preferred packaging mechanism (Snap) are two main disadvantages. But there are also others. X11 is very insecure. Ubuntu does not only package apps with Snap, but also kernel stuff. You will get second-class packages via apt and miss system patches, if you use Mint.
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Tumbleweed was very unstable and broke within a short time on my devices. Never experienced something like that on Arch.
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Me neither, but Arch is not for newbies. Im ok with it; can handle Arch with ease, but Im not a newbie.
Thats true. TBH Im seriously interested how come its still around… we have Wayland which is far more secure.
Linux Mint has experimental Wayland support. They’re hoping to have it ready in a few years.
In terms of timing Wayland support doesn’t need to be fully ready (i.e. to be a better Cinnamon option for most people) before 2026 (Mint 23.x). That leaves us 2 years to identify and to fix all the issues. It’s something we’ll continue to work on and improve release after release.
Whenever it happens, assuming it does, we’ll consider switching defaults. We’ll use the best tools to do the job and provide the best experience. Today that means Xorg. Tomorrow it might mean Wayland. Cinnamon and Linux Mint will be ready and compatible with both.
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I was in your camp previously, with regards to not using Signal flatpak. Now I am currently monitoring and studying how the manifest works. Supposedly, the the community flatpak pulls directly from the official Signal GitHub repo and builds from there, so there should be limited opportunity for shenanigans.
The alternative is to compile a .rpm from source:
I’ve previously compiled but as an AppImage instead. The steps are similar enough.
Its honestly ridiculous that Signal doesnt have an official flatpak
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When I briefly used Fedora, I read through this thread. My hopes for an official Flatpak from Signal in the future are low.
There’s also the (closed) Flatpak feature request issue.
2018:
Realistically, with limited resources—two people full-time on desktop app—there are other features that have higher priority and officially supporting more platforms might also introduce extra support needs which we might not be able to meet to people’s satisfaction with the current team size.
We’d appreciate community help on improving the documentation on how to install the app from source for people on non-Debian systems in the meantime. Hopefully, as we grow our team, we can make the app more easily available on more platforms.
There used to be a Chrome extension that Fedora users could use a few years ago, but this was removed. The best option to me seemed to be the Open Build System RPM as it was maintained by a Fedora packager.
Since Signal closes feature requests on their Github page and asks you to discuss them in the community forums, the current place for that seems to be here: Signal Desktop for non-APT Linux distributions - Desktop Feature Requests - Signal Community
Basically, they don’t have the development resources to support Flatpak. Supporting Flatpak also means committing to supporting it in the future, so it’s not a decision they’re willing to make lightly.
I think it’s stupid that they decided to go with an Ubuntu / Debian specific format as their ONLY option instead of AT LEAST something like Snap that can be installed in many more distros.
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Snap was only introduced in 2016. Signal Desktop was first announced in 2015, so they went with the technologies that existed at the time. It would take more development resources to re-assess the situation, and it seems to work well enough for everybody except, well, Fedora and OpenSUSE.
So what? That’s 9 years since then and packaging an app for a different format is not rocket science.
There are also other Linux distros out there, which are not supported.
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I imagine Linux is not a priority for Signal Desktop.
Arch has an easy way of installing the package from the official repositories, which is about as good as an official package from Signal, in my opinion. I don’t know any other major distribution that isn’t a fork which is affected by the lack of an official Signal package.
Obviously, an official Flatpak package would be ideal, but it seems unlikely at this point.
But I’ll leave it there since this has diverged from the main topic