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.

FAR: Lone Sails

What Remains of Edith Finch

Divinity II: Original Sin

Frostpunk

These are all (mostly) non-vocal, great for some background noise. Great games too!

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.

It is currently singleplayer vs bots and the scenarios are admittedly limited. However, again, single dev (at the moment). Multiplayer is on the roadmap far in the future and will likely not really be pvp as that introduces challenges for balancing.

For now though, the designer is very free in what it lets you do for the most part and has a lot of options.

If you’re on the fence, I would recommend looking up some videos on youtube that showcase the game’s capabilities. Make sure to pick a decently recent one (ergo past half year or so).

While it does indeed kind of smell like an ad, keep in mind this is not some triple-A bullshit. It’s made by a single dev and has a heavily involved community on reddit and discord where competitions are hosted and suggestions are made. Regardless of tankies reputation, that kind of behaviour is not tolerated in either of those communities. I’ve been playing it on and off and have over 500 hours into it by now. It is a very niche game, but for those that like tanks and military games in general, it is a real gem.