I too have switched from LM22 to LMDE6, I switched due to driver issues with my Nvidea card, I bit the bullet and picked up a cheap AMD card but I can see no reason to switch back to regular Mint. Can I say again that Spiral Linux Cinnamon edition is also a great alternative to Mint, the Debian extended long term support provided by Spiral is a major bonus.
A short update on the upgrade process to Fedora 41. I decided to go via terminal to have a look what's actually going on. Normally you can start the upgrade process within the discover app (GUI)... It all went smoothly without any issues. Afterwards I had a look at the system to see if there is something else left to do (cleaning old stuff, etc). There was no garbage left. I did revert some system configs to the package maintainer's default, though. I also updated my rescue kernel to ver. 41 manually and the bootloader to the latest as well. I am still impressed by Fedora. Plugged in a new QDOLED monitor, Fedora recognized it and my dimming (brightness control) / HDR and FreeSync settings worked out of the box. There is only one downside. As being said....there is always a lot of stuff to be downloaded as updates. My biggest one had been 6.4 GB after some weeks. This is actually far more than an entire new ISO image of the OS itself.
A quick update. Fedora 42 has been released. As usual I'll wait a few weeks before I upgrade. The KDE version is now no spin anymore, it's got the same status than the gnome release. Also it comes now with the cosmic desktop (spin) and there is a new web installer. Still very satisfied with Fedora. My interests moved a bit. From gaming on Linux to run AI on Linux. (Diffusion models on ComfyUI). It is rock stable and gets the latest stuff quickly. It is IMO the best distro for those having new hardware and want to have stability, too.
Honestly any base distro would do, i would say go straight with Arch, maybe painful but you will actually learn most of things because you don't have a luxury like not learning and still being able to use your system properly, same road with Debian but with less pain
I have upgraded to Fedora 42. While the upgrade went fine, this time there is a little issue with an app. Steam didn't launch anymore. It's the RPM fusion nonfree edition. There is a workaround to launch it with variable __GL_CONSTANT_FRAME_RATE_HINT=3. No big deal, but I wonder why the issue still persists till today and Fedora didn't fix that. It seemingly was an issue at beta already.
Try using flatpaks. I would recommend using silver blue and flatpaks but only use flathub as the source.
I am actually quite satisfied with the RPM fusion repos. I only use flatpaks if there is no RPM alternative. I decided to go for Fedora KDE since I like to tinker with the system. I have the right BTFS partitioning configured so I can use timeshift properly. I can tinker without any worries. If installing AI platforms you have to use special versions of python, virtual env. etc....dunno if siverblue would be 'free' enough to do so. Either way, the mentioned issue was actually introduced by Nvidia (driver). The flatpak version of steam also used this fix since then. With the latest Nvidia driver update the issue has been resolved. Steam is running now normally. Now it's clear why Fedora could not fix that anytime soon.