Seriously, you guys need to stop trying to troubleshoot Linux's shortcomings at people. I know. Everybody knows. If you don't, that's the first thing any tutorial will tell you. I'm not looking for technical help, just sharing an anecdote.

If you're curious, no, I couldn't do Pop because I needed some specific libraries and kernel modules to support this particular device's power management and I/O quirks and those were only officially supported in a handful of distros, so I picked one of the ones with better documentation, and even that wasn't meant for my specific hardware.

Not that it matters, because it's a laptop with a iGPU and a dGPU, and the Intel iGPU was just fine out of the box, so getting the Nvidia dGPU to work well was way down my priority list for this exercise, since the device was meant mostly for web browsing and media consumption. Instead, I had issues with sleep mode, since that was related to those specific modifications, and I coudn't figure out a way to make it wake from boot without locking up, which is a pretty big dealbreaker for a device on a battery. Plus the embedded audio controls had some issues, the touchpad was flaky and eventually trying to go through the process of getting that dGPU running exposed other compatibility troubles.

I was ready to roll back to Windows once I noticed the touchpad acceleration was messy out of the gate, honestly, that's my bar for troubleshooting tolerance. So no, I didn't fail to do a cursory Google search in 2020 and find out that Nvidia support is messy. I knew that my slightly nonstandard device was going to be a bit of a challenge, but was hoping to get lucky. Didn't get lucky and went back to what works on it. It's not a call for help, it's just a thing that happened last time I tried to switch a device to Linux.