With Ubuntu, the best version for hardware support of anything between 2 and 5 years old is with 20.04.

But you need to dig around for a few things, like git and openssh for git signing with ssh (I like not needing to think about a second keychain with gpg, and it's already what I use to auth to Github to push my commits, so why not sign it also).

Others too, I have brave, flatpak, a thing for libvirt/virt-manager for managing KVM and lxc containers, there is even a PPA for golang, which I now have pinned to 1.19, currently at 1.19.5, but nice to have it just there and only one copy needed system wide. It's the current best version for Go. And steam, of course.

And the interface. Well, Gnome is a bucket of proverbials after 20. Some parts of the shell have got better, but the whole thing weighs in about 5gb of constant memory utilisation at least, if not more.

There is a PPA called ubuntucinnamonremix for focal fossa 20.04 ubuntu. I am running this now and even with browser and Goland and music playing I'm only using about 3.5gb of memory! That means lots of my HDD access is being cached, everything snappy, everything in memory except when the dirty cache is being paged out to disk, which also speeds things up, oportunistically grouping writes to storage cylinders.

And Variety, don't forget to install Variety. Nothing worse than boring stock ubuntu wallpapers.

Oh, and another great thing, which I haven't fully got figured out, is using this tool called 'cubic' to get all your current installed packages, and put them into an install image so if you have to reset everything, it will rewrite all the files in the installer to the factory state and leave your folders as is. So it snapshots your system configuration.

apt list --installed|cut -f1 -d'/'|xargs>packagelist.txt

to capture your system's existing package installations to use in the chroot that cubic lets you make from a base iso image.

I'm still working on more labor-free and resilient methods of keeping my system consistent, but this means I can just refresh my system easily now.

Pop OS has a feature like this, but it's totally doable with ubiquity as is in Ubuntu just by not formatting your disk, everything is set back to normal but everything in your profile retained. So all user-install stuff sticks also. The only things that get lost tend to be pam.d and similar folders that you may modify for u2f as I have on my system, but a lot of things that are not part of the normal configuration, like added items in the '/etc/apt/sources.d' folder, for example, remain. The thing is that the U2F stuff anyway you have to make a new key with the fresh install as it has a new machine ID, but you will lose the settings in the files. Well, I just need to back them up to my home folder I guess, and then they can be restored easily.