In short, no. Linux can be adversarial, finicky, and sometimes just plain bullshit. That’s the price of device freedom though. Can’t speak for anyone else, but it does get easier the longer you stick with it though.

Love Mint. I have LMDE on my archival machine. It’s good stuf

POP_OS runs great and it’s my primary OS on my System76 machine. My issue seems to be more to do with Nvidia Drivers. Nothing that’s a deal breaker, but the Machine Spirit needs appeasement on occasion. I’m actually really excited for COSMIC to be released.

On my Asus machine, I’m just tired of Windows and want to familiarize myself with more of the Linux environment. It’s maybe 2 or 3 years old at this point

I might check out Fedora. Is switching between the iGPU and dGPU relatively straightforward?

Thanks for the recommendations! Bazzite seems like a good fit for this machine’s use case.

Thanks for your thoughts. My experience with Arch has been weird. I can get everything mostly working, but sound has always been an issue on my current hardware. Black Arch was fun to mess around with because I didn’t necessarily care if sound output was borked. I will look into cachyOS and spin up a VM. Thank you friend!

I guess I’m kind of confused as to the debate between Bleeding Edge vs Stable. I get the concept on paper, but what packages are so imperative that you need a Distro that is “Bleeding Edge”. I run Pop_OS and it works great on my hardware(System76 so it kind of has the home field advantage). I have an old laptop running LMDE that doesn’t ever need rebooted and it has every package I need for it to accomplish its job.

Others have given better advice than I will, but maybe determine why you need something that’s bleeding edge. If the only answer is “Cuz Shiny new stuff!” I don’t think it’s needed that bad and tailor your setup for stability and functionality. I prefer Just Works Distros though. VM’s are also a thing if you want to do some Distro Hopping