I recommend Fedora to everyone wanting a desktop alternative to Ubuntu. It's a well-balanced distribution that is opinionated enough to work fine as-is but doesn't try to force things on you the way Ubuntu does with snaps.

What DEs are common/supported on Fedora, I use KDE (Kubuntu), I'm not keen on snaps and so it seems expedient to switch distros when I next install (as it seems Ubuntu are all in for snaps).

You want Kinoite: https://kinoite.fedoraproject.org/ it's Fedora's equivalent of Kubuntu. I'm a GNOME user but I've heard good things.

Well, this is a KDE variant of Fedora Silverblue, so there are some quirks. If you want normal Fedora but with KDE, there is a KDE spin available: https://spins.fedoraproject.org/kde/

Whoops! Nice catch, I love Silverblue but forgot this was the Silverblue KDE spin.

Gnome is the default and there's a KDE "spin", but I use Sway myself so I can't really comment on how well KDE works.

I can't do that because I don't want to update every 6 months. If I wanted to do that I'd just move to arch/endeavour.

You don't _have_ to update every 6 months. Each release is supported for around 13 months so you can hop every 2 releases.

> There seem to be more and more things that are only delivered as snaps.

I'm on Ubuntu, and of all the software I use (I count around 20 programs installed not through the Ubuntu apt repositories), fortunately only two are available only on snaps - Chromium and Subsync. The first actually accelerated my move to Firefox.

Regarding Subsync, I had to write a ridicolous script to start/stop all the snap services - ridicolous because Snap has an integrity service that overwrites any change to the Snap system (!!), so one can't even hack the Snap system files without disabling such service. It actually gets worse - Ubuntu has a relatively tight intergration with snap: one can't have the `snapd` serviced disabled (without hacks), because the Ubuntu software upgrade invokes it if present, and if it's disabled, the upgrade will hang.

If Ubuntu will force more software to go through Snap, I'll abandon it (after many, many years).

Yikes! I fortunately haven't run into this yet. There are very few cases where I would take the easy road and install a snap (maybe a one-time use CLI where performance doesn't matter and I'd uninstall after?). If not in apt I'd probably ignore the suggestion and look for a ppa, binary, or, in rare cases, compile from source.