GnomeComedy
Tell me you don't understand what those distros are without telling me you don't understand what those distros are.
Have you searched this question online? It's been asked thousands of times. See Sander Van Vugt's books and videos. 2nd best thing to the official resources (if not better in some ways).
And use Linux for work, what's your point? You seem to imply Linux is only for personal.
Finder is crasherific.
Rocky Linux would meet all of your needs easily and give you 10 years of support.
That's not how failing hardware works. Recycle and use another piece of non failing hardware.
Please just nail laptops and get where they are in stock and new parts keep being released before you spread yourself too thin.
Reminds me of the KDE guy who quit Red Hat when they used to do exactly that (make KDE behave like GNOME) 22 years ago.
https://www.theregister.com/2002/09/26/kde_red_hat_spat_escalates/
Can you use snaps with autofs/NFS yet?
I can only imagine what that much RAM and a system that could hold it cost 10 years ago. Yikes.