To respond to your first part about operating system: I bought a computer with Pop!_OS but I promptly reformatted the disk and installed openSUSE on it. No issues at all. I did notice that in their preinstalled OS they did some customizations (enabling GNOME fractional scaling for example) but nothing that's not available in other distros. They have a nice Pop!_OS shell that's friendly to those new to tiling window managers, but that's also something you can install on other distros. I have previously mentioned on HN how I like that shell: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295421