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.
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.
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.
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. 👌