OpenSuse Tumbleweed to the Rescue
I recently upgraded a desktop computer, and to my surprise, the new motherboard was not fully supported by most Linux distributions. The main culprit was the network adapter, although the secure boot setup gave me lots of troubles as well. I had only a small usb key (2GB) and most (all?) live distributions do not fit on 2GB anymore. With the exception of Ubuntu images, I did not manage to boot from USB hard drive where I dumped the live image ISO, due to Secure boot related issues, even when disabling the feature or changing the settings in the BIOS. Using the small USB key worked with Secure boot enabled only.
So I had to find a distribution with a small size and with a new kernel which supported the network adapter (6.13+). I tried the rawhide Fedora, which has a small network install image, but that just did not work, because it’s too alpha.
I thought most rolling distributions would fit the bill. It turns out they don’t, EndeavourOS or Manjaro have relatively recent live install but (a) they are not small enough to fit on the USB key and (b) the images are a few months old where the kernel is too old.
OpenSuse Tumbleweed provides a daily updated network installer iso (and a live CD), this is the only thing that worked, and it worked well.
Overall I was a bit surprised that it was so challenging to find an installable distribution with the latest kernel.