I’m in a lot of the same landscape as you, currently running a mac but ubuntu/fedora with gnome is looking at me from behind the corner. What’s blocking me at this time is client IT policies, in order to access stuff in their network it has to be their device and they don’t ship linux so. Next year it is.

Cool! Saving for later.

If you have an nvidia card, which is very common and can’t always be avoided, there is significant benefit in newer drivers, for one

I mean, there are quite a few others than Arch+family that package a very recent kernel too. Fedora as you mentioned, but also NixOS, openSUSE Tumbleweed and even Gentoo if you’re that kind of a person. I bet I missed some.

But yeah Ubuntu is not necessarily one of them

Right, okay. If you want to fool around as you have a stable daily driver already, sure get a more DIY distro or just try out multiple things before settling. Debian should do the trick though, it’s somewhat DIY while being very stable so the updates rarely break anything. But you might also like Arch, or NixOS, or just Mint. I think the point is it’s just not very easy to predict how each of these is gonna actually run on your actual hardware. So to really find out you’ll have to install something and acknowledge you may need to re-do it a couple times before finding something that works for you.

As you already use Pop, why change? Is there something bothering, or something does not run well? How old is this laptop?

If you don’t feel like continuing with Pop, I’d try Debian as you value stability. It may be a slight pain to set up initially, but when it’s done it should generally Just Work until eternity. The expert installer allows you to enable non-free repos for any proprietary drivers by default.

Mint has the downside of not coming with mainstream desktop environments. Otherwise a great distro, but the message it gives to newcomers is that Linux still looks like it looked 10 years ago. Still very worth for some installs, and op is not a newcomer, but anyway.

Arch defaults to pipewire I think even if you select pulseaudio in archinstall (might have changed by now ofc) If your laptop is older pulseaudio might work much better (did for me)

Me, because someone at my work picked it for servers back in the day

Wanna share more details? Sounds like something I should actually put on my 32gb

Thanks!

For the record, which DE do you run on it? KDE?

Thanks!

Regarding gaming, I had big trouble trying to play some steam games on gnome. After switching to KDE stuff just works.

Also you can’t (feasibly) run Hyprland on Debian stable, nor can you (easily) run GNOME on MX Linux, etc. So there are a few points where distro choice does have an effect. But I think I got the point across enough with the question

Jerboa

Aurora store

F-droid

/e/OS

Something to consider, advice given to me, is that ZFS support on Linux regularly breaks with newest kernels so if you go for ZFS long term, be prepared to run a lts kernel at least as a backup.

I use both. LUKS+btrfs being nice on the Arch desktops, and ZFS on a serverside pool, managed by a TrueNAS Scale VM.