This is a very late reply, but I ended up formatting it back to Windows 11 and selling the laptop. It’s just not quite ready for primetime, and seems very limited during regular use-cases. I ended up buying a Framework 13 laptop, and installing Fedora on it. Couldn’t be happier! Eventually I may move back to ARM-based machines once they progress a bit further.

This is why I use xManager for free Spotify Premium, YouTube Revanced for free YouTube premium, and torrent everything else that I need. I’m so tired of subscriptions for literally everything.

My spice tolerance definitely increased after living in Sichuan Province for 6 months.

I have YouTube ReVanced on my phone. If YouTube ever defeats uBlock Origin on my desktop, I just won’t watch YouTube on desktop anymore. I refuse to watch or view ads.

I’ve hopped around to a bunch of different distros, but I always return to Debian Stable. I don’t really need the most bleeding-edge packages for my system, due to my use case.

Most of my actual apps are installed via Flatpak, so they’re all pretty recent, while still being on a rock-solid stable distribution.

I definitely do recommend setting the max_parallel_downloads to between 10 and 20. I had the same issue as OP with DNC being super slow, and this fixed it perfectly. I don’t know why that’s not set by default.

I use Fedora. I like the combination of recent, stable, up-to-date software, new releases every six months, and firmware updates for my ThinkPad direct from Lenovo.