Seeing as how I don't like either Gnome or KDE, though I did give KDE a try, I decided to switch to Cinnamon. Yes, that picture looks odd, I'm short on monitors that'll fit on the space I have left on my desk, so I'm using an old Dell with a 4:3 ration thanks to an HDMI to VGA converter. Some how there's dust in the display though, which is really annoying.
Not much to say, if'n you've used Linux Mint, this should look rather familiar, it's just lightly customized at this point, it'll get more, and it works as you'd expect.
Yes, this is the X11, and you're supposed to use Wayland. Funny thing about that, this is rock solid, whereas with Wayland I had a bunch of silly problems, can't drag tabs in Firefox, menu glitches, and no keyboard customization.
General problems are minor, boot is real slow, I mean real slow, and Sat's update broke wireless, but I'm only feet from my gateway, so wired it is.
Overall this works real nice, basically Mint running on an M1 iMac.
I’ve had those similar issues with Wayland on previous distros as well. I think Bazzite was the first distro so far for me that worked fully out of the box with Wayland.
I think the browser issues are just Firefox, I suspect it isn't playing nicely with Wayland or they haven't figured it out, as tabs aren't draggable, but there's a move tab menu choice. Also right click doesn't work right, I forgot to mention that, right clicking on a link opens in a new tab and switches you to it, even if'n you don't have that on.
As to the keyboard, the layouts section is completely missing in Cinnamon's keyboard menu, and some research online came back that there's no way to change the layout, apparently it was overlooked by the Wayland project.
I was using Wayland on Tumbleweed on my laptop and desktop PC. I had to switch back to X on the desktop, which uses an NVIDIA card, because Firefox windows kept doing this weird flashing. Pretty much everything else worked OK but Firefox was unusable.