It certainly has downsides in that regard, I will not deny that. However, if you want something that Just Works™, it is a very good option in my (admittedly limited) experience.

To add, if OP is looking to use the laptop for gaming, I can recommend Bazzite. Built upon fedora with some quality of life things and very stable as it’s immutable. Very hard to fuck up.

Honestly not planning anything crazy either. And thankfully I do know how to use command line so it doesn’t have to be 100% newbie friendly, the reason those two are my top choices is due to the included nvidea drivers. Mint was on my mind too, but from what I read it is better suited for older hardware, whereas I am using a decently modern system (Ryzen 7 3700x & RTX 3060 Ti).

If I may ask, from a user standpoint, how easy was it to switch from GNOME to KDE on Pop! and what were your problems with GNOME in the first place? Browsing both choices, it looks like both are very customizable, and those plugin options for GNOME look pretty neat. I am aware that GNOME does use more resources, but given my system specs it’s not my biggest concern.

Windows 10, still using it but am browsing distros and aim to switch before August. Most likely candidate for me right now is Pop! OS, but given that they have halted development for it to work on their own DE (by the looks of it at least) I may go for Fedora or regular Ubuntu instead.