openSUSE Leap - YaST is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and works great on command line over SSH. Yes, sometimes installing some software is difficult, but generally most stuff you would want is there and a lot of stuff runs on Docker anyway now. Very stable too, have had nearly zero issues.

Yup, was using Spectacle, behaviour was similar to your description. I guess maybe the HDR highlights just got more blown out on higher brightness displays?