I feel the same way on PoPOS. I have compiled my own kernel (it's actually not that difficult honestly) and done all matter of work at work. It's also how I know the system is super stable and I don't have to mess with things for my daily driver stuff.
We've been using the open-source driver with workstation-grade cards at my employer for a while. The open-source driver didn't get full support for consumer-grade cards until version 560 which was only released around 6 months ago.
There's also LMDE which is mint built on Debian instead of Ubuntu. The Mint guys had the foresight to prepare for a future when they'd get fed up with Ubuntu's nonsense.
Same. I recently spent a few hours failing to either build gamescope from source or get the flatpak versions of gamescope and steam working together. Others got it working a few months ago, but their steps didn’t work for me and I just decided I’d rather spend my time playing without HDR than keep trying at it. Wouldn’t have been so hard on a disto better supported by gamescope.
I run my "work machine" (Windows 11 VM) in Proxmox, cause I aint running windows on bare metal 🤘 Also means it's always available wherever I happen to be, via Apache Guacamole. 👌