> Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates

I pulled the same update, and it was annoying but it came nowhere near bricking itself. The integrated graphics worked, it just disabled the Nvidia open-source driver for the GPU. Simply (re)installing it fixed it. Notably, just asking ChatGPT for the solution worked (after pasting the output of a few commands).