Yeah idk. I was more interested in trying to stick with an Ubuntu-based (or at the very least a Debian-based) OS just because it's easier to search for an issue and have those related distros be the top result.

I remember years back when I first discovered Mint it seemed like the perfect end user focused Linux distro. It worked so much better out of the box than even Ubuntu (which is already very user friendly), with very minimal configuring needed...installing a lot of things out of the box that even Ubuntu didn't do at the time. I was deciding between Mint and Pop OS to try out on my laptop, and ultimately went with Pop OS because of GNOME and because I heard they have a bit better hardware support (altho I don't have an NVIDIA card so that might be moot).

I get that you can install other desktop environments on your system, but if your distro is built with something in mind it seems better to try that first. I also didn't want to necessarily want to jump back into Ubuntu after all these years, because I hear it doesn't run as well as other distros with these new Snaps things. The point would be to make my laptop run better than it is, not worse.

I don't mind a bit of tinkering here and there, but I have no interest in 3l337 h@X0r level distros. The more user friendly and "it just works", the better. I'm not a programmer, nor do I work in IT or anything of the sort. I prefer GUI based programs, not terminal based ones.

POP!_OS does not use archaic packages for system components. It ships with the latest stable kernel, mesa and pipewire (and Steam + Nvidia)

The distribution is just on a feature hiatus until the summer when COSMIC is realeased.