Well, they haven't committed to a release number and I don't know what priority the ticket has, however if you use KDE there will be a workaround for night light without GAMMA_LUT for Plasma 6.
ProtonBadger
I have the laptop set to NVidia Dedicated mode, the integrated GPU is dormant at all times (verified with nvtop), so I don't have any experiences with Optimus. I don't use suspend, I turn it on in the morning, off in the evening.
Same, am happily using an NVidia 3060 laptop with Wayland+Plasma. Playing BG3 and Guildwars2 on Proton+Xwayland. Got a Plasma panel freezing bug (that's applicable to non-Intel GPU's) that fortunately had a workaround so I'm fine.
So for some use cases at least it's OK. They seem to be working more on Wayland now: In the next driver they're fixing a number of things bothering some people like v-sync and Vulkan on Prime. They also have a ticket in progress for nightlight (GAMMA_LUT support) but not sure what version it's headed for.
I'm lucky that I don't need long battery life, I'm always plugged in for gaming, so I have set the Nvidia GPU in Dedicated mode. I suspect not having both (optimus or prime) have eliminated a lot of issues, it works well with Wayland and Plasma and games like BG3 and Guildwars2 under Proton+Xwayland.
Actually it's not too bad on the battery when not gaming, despite always running NVidia.
I didn't like it because of discussions of it online. But then my Steam malfunctioned because of a Mesa update and I decided to try it anyway and form my own opinion. Turns out it works really well (for me), it's performant and I like that it installs without root password and is mildly sandboxed so installers can't put files just anywhere in my system.
It's not so much about necessity of it as it's pros vs. cons of different package managers, Flatpak vs. pacman vs rpm vs snap vs appimage and repositories (the AUR is nice for example, but also a bit like the Wild West), etc. Pick what fits your personal philosophy and enjoy.
Yes, the Arch wiki is spectacular, many users of other distros come there, via search engines, for help.
I'd say use EndeavourOS and if you choose NVidia in the menu when you boot the installer it will install the distro with NVidia drivers from the start and there's nothing to fiddle with. The updater (called yay) will henceforth update NVidia drivers as needed. It's one of the most handsfree NVidia experiences there is as kernel and driver updates are automatic via Arch.
I also suggest installing apps via Flatpak, this way there wont be problems with library versioning and system and apps are separated nicely. You can install KDE Discover for example to have a GUI app "store" that supports Flatpak. Just make sure to have the right Desktop portal installed. I run KDE but for some reason needed both the kde and gtk portals to get nice fonts everywhere.
You install stuff with Yay or Flatpak, e.g. "yay -S xdg-desktop-portal-kde" or "flatpak install com.valvesoftware.Steam". If you use Flatpak install Flatseal, it can handle permissions, for example you can give Steam access to another folder you want to use for games, for example I use /home/protonbadger/Games/ and gave Steam access to the folder this way.
SUSE Tumbleweed is a good alternative and more polished for desktop users, but you'll have to install NVidia drivers manually afterwards, there are wiki guides and youtube videos showing how. Occasionally when a new kernel update comes out the NVidia drivers trail a day or two so be aware of that on SuSE. NVidia have their own official repository with SUSE drivers.
I suggest trying both first in virtual machines for a few weeks.
Yeah, it's very typical human to double down when things start to go wrong. It's this kind of stubborn bloody minded mindset and a lot of luck that saved Tesla when it was balancing on a knife's edge and same with SpaceX, he kept pushing his crazy ideas but they worked out in the last second. However, Twitter is a different beast entirely, it's not going to be saved by manufacturing, it's about something Elon Musk does poorly with: people.
Just some simple stuff:
Strix ~> alias
alias balanced 'asusctl profile -P balanced'
alias performance 'asusctl profile -P performance'
alias quiet 'asusctl profile -P quiet'
alias upd 'yay ; flatpak update'
I enjoy that extra stability and separation between system and apps, especially as I use a rolling distro as a gamer. Hearing talk about Flatpak I disliked it for the same reasons, but I decided to try it out after Steam Native bugged due to a system library update. I enjoy it now also because it feels good that installing apps don't get a root password and scatter files everywhere they please in the system.
On servers it's different ofcourse, Flatpak is basically for desktop apps. Snap is also designed for text mode stuff, servers and IoT devices but there's the problem with it being controlled by one company.
When Covid came to town I started learning French to do something constructive. I started with 1 hour+ Duolingo a day, then after a year I added comic books (Tintin/Asterix/Spirou/Natacha/etc.). Now I am reading the Maigret novels.
I finished the Duolingo course after ~3 years but they added more content so now I do ~15min a day just for fun, while most of my learning is through reading interesting novels, like Maigret.
I also took the ANUx's Astrophysics XSeries Program on EdX, it's spectacular and I learned so much from it. So I keep better up with new discoveries and understand what's going on.
I think it's complex and the problem have been many things. When Apple pitched an open version of iMessage to the carriers long ago they refused because the didn't like the E2EE. They were surprised when Apple later introduced a proprietary version (and subsequently discovered it was a competitive advantage).
Now there's a Client-server encrypted version of RCS in GSMA but the E2EE version is Google's and running on Google's service. It was only recently that two carriers in the US agreed to use Google's messaging app for interoperability but is E2EE in GSMA?
Interoperability have been a problem as at one point carriers weren't even interoperable while using Universal Profile (I think they are now). Apple surely wont use it unless forced (it makes business sense not to) but between GSMA Universal Profile (which Apple would have to use) and Google's much better version based on the Signal protocol the current situation is also a mess.