I’ve had very good experiences with both but wanted to give debian a try, after accepting that it’s nvidia drivers and Optimus support suck, I need to decide whether to use EndeavourOS or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, not using base arch because I don’t want to go through the install hassle.
I just installed Debian 12 on an Optimus laptop and had no issues. Well none that I can blame on Debian. Somehow secure boot got re-enabled which blocks the Nvidia drivers from loading. But once I figured that out drivers installed great, and not having any problems. Worth a try since you say you want to try Debian.
Installed Tumbleweed on my laptop last weekend after giving up on Arch. I realized I just don’t have the time Arch demands. OpenSUSE has been pretty nice so far, everything seems to just work, I can’t complain!
I tested both and ended up with EndeavourOS because SuSE have some restrictions and issues with codecs and the Packman repository that can get a bit iffy… e.g. recently different versions of mesa on suse vs. packman messed up some applications, though it got fixed.
Also for some reason SuSE didn’t support my vol up/down keys, etc. I didn’t investigate.
So I grabbed EndeavourOS, choose [NVidia] proprietary drivers mode when booting the installer (the install will then automatically also install NV proprietary drivers). I picked the BTRFS filesystem with Grub (for snapshot support) at install and simply later ran “yay -S snapper-support btrfs-assistant” to get automatic snapshot support.
I do have Optimus disabled though, I run the Nvidia in Dedicated mode so I can’t say how well Optimus works.
Just wanted to pitch in my experience and say my volume up/down keys on my keyboard worked out of the box, so it’s not a universal issue, and still worth giving OpenSUSE a try.
I do use NVidia with OpenSUSE, but I don’t use Optimus, so I can’t be of much help.
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