Hmm...this is somewhat true, though it depends on what you refer to as bloat.

Still, Bohdi is magic.

Ah, noted. My bad, then.

May be a tad anedotal, but Ubuntu Tahr (and Unicorn) was buttery-smooth for me. The only things that happened for me with Tahr was flickering when booting up (nothing after though) and YouTube videos playing the sound, but not the video (which turned out to be that I didn't use the HTML5 player).

Unicorn, on the other hand, gave me 0 problems.

On a not-so-anecdotal topic, Arch, for a bleeding-edge distro, has yet to give me problems. I keep fishing for 'em, but they ain't bitin'.

I feel you. I mean, at the end of the day, the innards are still Ubuntu, but the Mint folks like to work their own sorcery with it.

I guess Arch is out of the question

OpenSUSE vs. Mint is definitely an interesting choice. It's your decision at the end of the day, but here's why I'd go with OpenSUSE:

-if you don't like using the terminal, Mint has no equivalent to YaST for administrative tasks
-OpenSUSE has Fedora-level support; Mint does not
-since OpenSUSE isn't a fork, its documentation is rather straightforward and more uniform
-YaST2 is much faster than Mint's package manager