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 don't want to be a pain, but it's not "basically Mint running on an M1 iMac." it's Asahi/Fedora running Cinnamon. Also, you've connected an external monitor for an M1 iMac? Do you mean it's an M1 Macbook instead?