I had a similar experience on my laptop. I tried Ubuntu which broke after trying to throw on Nvidia drivers (using the official docs). I tried Mint and Debian, both of which couldn’t detect my laptop’s wifi card (after hours of trying to fix - apparently a common issue but the fixes did not work for me!). I landed on Fedora, worked great. I’m now on EndeavourOS, but Fedora was the stepping stone I needed.
My desktop I built recently is Bazzite, which is Fedora based and I love it.
Hello neighbor! NC will welcome you. It’s purple here. Rural areas are not so great but closer to the bigger cities (Charlotte, Raleigh, Asheville, Greensboro/Winston) are nice.
Sorry about your sanity.