I have the Framework 13 and am currently running the COSMIC alpha on Pop!_OS. I love my current setup, but have tried Fedora Kinoite as well, and also had a great experience. Apart from running a few commands to get the fingerprint reader working, I haven't really had to troubleshoot anything. Its been a solid experience from Day 1.
Had a cheesy horror movie night with friends, watched Drag Me to Hell. The best bad special effects you'll ever see.
The new COSMIC desktop by System76 and Pop!_OS is very promising. I've been running the pre-alpha, and have been very impressed.
I'm not alone in struggling to finish a campaign, it seems! I really enjoy the sense of discovery and exploration that comes with starting a new game, but once I hit the mid-game point and the world's boundaries are established, my interest starts to fade.
It helped me tremendously in college, and I still use it today, both for past knowledge retention, as well as learning some new things. It is an incredible tool.
As far as the learning curve goes, I would recommend this: just use it as is. You can dive down a rabbit hole of optimizing your learning approach and adding the right extensions, but that time is better spent just studying what you want to learn.
Use the Cloze format, keep cards limited to a couple sentences at most, and practice daily for a couple minutes, and you can't go wrong.