It seems that making a smooth and frictionless ball point pen is one of the most challenging problems in mechanical engineering. I understand why there was a high chance that moving the production overseas didn’t meet quality standards. It reminds me of this video: https://youtu.be/nKURE05_RPI where he explains what it the took chinese gov to come up with a working product.
Why not use OpenSuse. We use it where I work in about 25 developer laptops, plus 1 Ubuntu (choice of the person themselves) and it has been rock stable. We should have about 50 by end of this year, out of 950 devices in total. Let’s go for something made in EU and of good quality.