What do you mean by that?

I use Niri. It just feels right to me, having lots of space to stick windows (scroll horizontally, switch workspaces vertically).

It takes some getting used to, but tthe overview is helpful, and here’s always the window switcher if you “lost” a window. But what really changed the game for me were special “focus-or-spawn” keybindings with nirius, e.g. when I press Meta+B my browser opens, or if it is already open it is focused.

If you only want to use scrolling for some workspaces, you can have a look at Umbriel. It looks really interesting, I haven’t had time to try it out.

I think OpenSUSE is a great choice for anyone who wants to actually learn Linux, which is what the OP asked for.

X13 here, I can’t recommend it enough.

How does Noctalia compare to DMS? They seem to be very similar projects, and I’m just curious to hear from people who have tried both.

I have no experience with HPC clusters, just dropping in to contribute my opinions on the NixOS stuff.

I won’t be actively maintaining the cluster at all times and find it nice that if someone needs some software I can point them to the configuration and tell them to modify it and then just update the system.

This sounds good in theory, but in practice few people will have the know-how or patience to make changes to your config.

I read that NixOs can have problems with cuda drivers and custom compiled software, which would definitely be a deal breaker.

NixOS is very flexible and you can certainly bake custom compiled software into the builds, but expect a steep learning curve.