The 2/3 spins I'm trying to decide between are Fedora KDE Plasma and Fedora Kinoite (with an honorable mention to Fedora Cinnamon).

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Some background: I've been lightly using Linux for just under a year in a Chromebook's development environment while I waited on my new laptop pre-order (Framework 16) to be fulfilled. When I got it about a month ago I started driving LMDE 6 (Linux Mint Debian Edition) due to the fact that heard Mint was one of the easiest distros to learn on, the fact that it was based on the Debian source rather than Ubuntu (heard about peoples grievances with Ubuntu/Canonical, Snaps, etc) and idealizing things closer to the original source (not forks upon forks). Not to mention that most programs with native Linux support are at least in a .deb format which I had experience with on the Chromebook and I had grown to love Cinnamon's Nemo file manager both on the Chromebook and LMDE.

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Reason I'm planning on switching: I'm starting to notice some instability in LMDE that I didn't have before and am unsure about the source. Unfortunately, Framework is still a new and small company so they can only officially support 2 Linux distros; Ubuntu LTS and Fedora. I didn't want to use Ubuntu so I looked closer at Fedora and saw that while the official Fedora Workstation is GNOME which I dislike but it had Spins of Cinnamon by the Mint team that I already liked but also KDE Plasma.

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Now back to the conundrum: As I explored Linux fully on LMDE I grew to notice that in general I loved most of KDE's applications over alternatives. The only problem was that I almost had to always install them via flatpak to get even close to updated software. With that came one of my only grievances with containerized software, the applications failed to pick up Cinnamon's theming without major tweaks (which I'm afraid may be the source of some of my problems with LMDE). The reason I'm debating between KDE and Kinoite is because I imagine a they both have a Plasma DE (desktop environment) which I imagine will mean KDE apps are better supported by the repos and probably carry theming across the qt/gtk divide (not sure what I'm talking about but hopefully you understand what I'm trying to convey) better. I tossed Fedora KDE into a VM (virtual machine) yesterday just to get a better look at the Plasma DE and can see why it's so popular. Hopefully as I get more confident with Linux I can change out some of the things I didn't like as much with their Cinnamon equivalent if I don't grow to love the Plasma version too.

The main reasons I'm having difficulty deciding between the 2 is containerization, repos, and "immutable." I like the idea of containerization for security purposes and the fact that it makes apps distro agnostic. When I was looking at the KDE spin in the VM I noticed that for some apps there were 3 options: rpm and flatpak like there was deb and flatpak on Mint but there also appeared to be something in between. Can somebody explain that please. Also, how do both KDE and Kinoite handle theming containerized applications. I know Kinoite wont be broken by anything by what I do but will it also mean that I can only install flatpaks? There are some programs that I can't get as a flatpak or as an rpm so I'll have to learn how to compile them from source which I have yet to even attempt and would I have to do something different/take extra steps to make it work as a container?

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If you're able to answer any of my questions, point out any pros/cons/gripes with one and/or the other of the two different Plasma spins, thank you. I hope to only have to distro hop once as it's taking forever to backup my data.