I keep seeing Pop recommended so hijacking for an issue I ran into switching away from it - I had to completely wipe the drive prior to formatting the drive for whatever Debian based distro I was checking out.

Long story short, it was due to the bootloader for Pop remaining and interfering with the install process. So a full wipe wouldn't be necessary most likely, just clearing your boot partition should be enough.

I've found NixOS to be one of the easiest distros to use because everything is reproducible, I'm not too sure why everyone who uses it says it's a hard one to begin with

At the start you just go with the template the installer gives you, and add packages to the package list it generates, then as you want more advanced features options start to come in handy and they're just as straightforward

No nasty hidden surprises, everything for the most part works exactly how you'd expect (with the exception of syntax with some of the more funky features but you don't need those to manage a system at the bare minimum

Ubuntu on the other hand when I started using it I had to run a few random commands (disabling broken Nvidia services) after hours of digging just to get my mouse pointer to work after hibernation) and had to do that every single time I switched to a different distro, wasn't even an issue out of the box on nixos

And if you're stuck a fix that worked for someone else will almost always work for you unless it's a hardware specific issue