I ended up heading off to Arch. I've always enjoyed messing around with nonstandard desktop setups, and it was really appealing for that because of the lean def

I ended up heading off to Arch. I've always enjoyed messing around with nonstandard desktop setups, and it was really appealing for that because of the lean default system that Arch provides, along with the availability of so much software through the AUR. One perk of the AUR (although it does come with some security concerns, etc.) is that you can use one of several package managers to handle both it and the standard repositories under one framework, dealing with exactly the issue I had with snap without needing PPAs and the like.