This thread has basically devolved into "Ubuntu hate circlejerk party", as expected. I guess I just hate the distro I've spent the majority of my time on Linux using getting constantly dunked on and am a bit sad watching its inevitable death by snap. (Insert Thanos meme here)

Very true and good points, and when it comes to snap I mostly agree with you. I would guess the "war on Ubuntu" going on is more due to Ubuntu's history of making controversial decisions that go against the grain of what most other distros are doing at the time (creating and dropping Mir, creating Unity instead of using GNOME and then switching back to GNOME when they finally got Unity working well, installing an Amazon app out of the box in one version), many of which angered a lot of Linux community members before who are still angry despite Ubuntu rolling back most of those decisions, and they've found snap a great current scapegoat issue to use to vent their long-standing frustrations with Ubuntu at.

EDIT: I also notice to a lesser degree a weird fanboy-ism around Flatpak which I think also contributes to it. Pretty much when Flatpak came out the attitude was, "this is the standard for containerized binaries, no alternatives or exceptions will be tolerated", and immediately they went on the warpath to destroy both snap and appimage (though to be fair appimage really isn't great).

I used OpenSUSE for a few months, both Leap and Tumbleweed, and the system itself was mostly snappy and stable, overall a pretty solid distro. My one real pain point using it was that I somewhat frequently ran into the problems of either dependency hell or update de-syncs between the main repos and Packman (which I needed due to not shipping with codecs I needed). That said, it surprises me that OpenSUSE doesn't get more attention as a stable, high quality distro. They're content to do their own thing, and they do it well.

Right, download the .exe from the LoL website.

Did you use Lutris' preset Wine prefix and settings for LoL from the Lutris website when you tried installing? You can find or search for the presets directly in Lutris. I think you also do need to have the .exe available if I remember right from having installed it recently.