I don't use Ubuntu on my desktop but in my experience it performs on par with other distributions and it is not a RAM hog either.
I thing "bloat" is a big mythical monster people like to throw around because it's difficult to argue against and scares everybody.
I think snaps were slow to load to begin with but I also read that it was much improved recently, one can also install Flatpak.
So I think Ubuntu is a great distro, performant and stable.
Tumbleweed. I've used Linux since the nineties so I know my way around but I appreciate a sane default desktop install so I don't have to waste time fiddling too much.
People always talk about lean/fast/customizing, in reality most distros are performant and fairly lean/bloat free, it's just how Linux is. TW is no exception and like all the others it's easy to customize. I don't use YAST.
I can get comfortable almost any distro, though I prefer those with systemD+Wayland and Nvidia drivers in a repo so they update with the rest. I like rolling release, also considering the pace of Wayland and KDE development.
For new users I always recommend Mint.
Indeed, besides most linux distributions are fairly equally lightweight and can be customized. I tried 4-5 distros this past January (Arch being one) when I got my new gaming laptop and they all booted in ~9.5 sec for example, and perform equally well in general, they had fairly similar RAM load with the same desktop environment.
Arch is about managing the system as a hobby, which is fine.
One problem here is that new users install Endeavour/Garuda but don't know how to manage updates safely about pacnew/pacsave/etc. So the system might slowly "rot" without them knowing about it because new components use old configs, etc..
I also recommend Mint to new users. I don't use Mint, nor do I use Arch.
Yeah I had a similar issue, my Nvidia driver got updated to 545 and suddenly PRIME offload did not work for Steam games. After a little while Flatpak update pulled the nvidia 545 flatpak stuff and it started working again.
If you have issues it's usually a configuration issue or a misbehaving daemon, try investigating with "systemd-analyze blame", "systemd-analyze critical-chain" and "systemd-analyze plot > boot_anal.svg".
Meh, they both support a ton of formats and encodings. Just use whichever feel best, even install both.
The application startup test is designed to cold-load an application with heavy background IO going on.
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