I am currently planning to switch from my MacBook Pro to a dell XPS 13. My preference is to go Linux and I have been a long time Ubuntu user. Howev...
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I've used OpenSUSE (Tumbleweed) for a few weeks (maybe even months, don't remember exactly) before I switched to Arch (which was inspired by /r/unixporn, not a fault of OpenSUSE by any means).
I had a different laptop so YMMV, but I had far less driver problems on OpenSUSE than I previously had with Ubuntu and Fedora.
For package management, I used zypper and never had any problems with it, so I didn't even think about changing it.
Gnome vs KDE is probably just a matter of taste. I've always preferred KDE over Gnome for reasons I can't really articulate. Maybe it just felt more familiar. That said, since I've moved away from a full DE to i3 + a bunch of tools (polybar, rofi etc.), I've never thought of going back - it feels so much more performant and productive.
+1 for i3.