EndeavourOS is easy to install but unclear how to maintain.

• Don’t use GUI package managers, but here, have some GUI package managers.
• pacman, pacdiff, yay, eos, AUR??? The Complete Idiots Guide did not clear things up for me, either. AFAICT they made something more confusing than Arch, not less.

I just installed EndeavorOS on an HP Spectre360 that’s roughly 2 years old. I am honestly surprised at how easy it went.

I don't get your surprise. With a decent laptop like the one you have everything will work properly. You can even load something more stable like Debian into that and it will work just fine on the first attempt. No changes required.

The issue with stuff "not working out of the box" is usually related to people using unbranded potatoes or very old hardware with modern distros.

Maybe I upped the game too much when I decided to run Kinoite on Pi...

I'm glad it's going easy for you. Unfortunately after 3 hours of trying I still haven't gotten mint cinnamon installed yet. Bitlocker has been a pain to disable. I'm determined to get it working though, I'm really tired of microsoft

Yep, at this point Linux just does what I need it to.

which DE?

As long as your pc is a little bit behind its gonna be ok (unless you have a certain wifi chip)

Linux works for roughly 80% of what I do. The BIG missing piece is audio production. The software is mostly okay, it's the actual audio system that's the problem. Audio on Linux sucks big floppy donkey dicks. Yes, I know all about JACK (complicated and never works the way you think it should), RT kernels, Pipewire, etc. It's all terrible.