

Thank you, it seems every way I go i make the wrong choice lol
Welcome to linux.
What you were told about appimage depending on legacy stuff is also not true, it is the libfuse2 dependency, which hasn’t been a dependency of AppImage for 3 years (though some projects haven’t updated yet).
It also isn’t a big deal if you run into an appimage that still depends on it, archlinux which is a rolling release distro, some of its packages like mtpfs and ntfs-3g still depend on libfuse2 as well. And you can still run the AppImage by setting the env variable APPIMAGE_EXTRACT_AND_RUN=1
to avoid having to install libfuse2 in those cases.
Unfortunately because PopOS is based on debian/ubuntu, they tend to split packages into a million pieces, so something that would have a simple
pacman -Syu mesa vulkan-radeon
on archlinux to get the video drivers is like 6 different packages on debian which I don’t know the names of.Fedora is the testing ground of red hat, they are known for pushing a lot of breaking changes constantly, even more than Archlinux or other rolling release distros. A while back they pulled this nonsense that we had to deal with that not even upstream approves of.
So my only distro recommendation is archlinux or some archlinux fork, every time I have had to help people with distro issues they all eventually ended up in arch because all other distros have some weird issue that’s a deal breaker. Just don’t rely too much on the Aur.
My other suggestion is that you get most of your software as appimage thru AM: https://github.com/ivan-hc/AM
We ship Steam as an AppImage with a lot of common fixes that affect the flatpak version or native versions of steam (you can check them in the readme), and you don’t have to deal with the hassle of setting up the 32bit repo and installing Steam for example.