I had to get away from Ubuntu because of the recent performance issues and the requirement to have an account to get updates faster. I have used CENTOS and more recently Rocky Linux on all my servers for over a decade, so Fedora was the obvious choice for me. I had problems with desktop applications being missing from rpm repos in the past, but that has greatly reduced improved and flatpack has helped with some stragglers. But I’m still not a fan of RedHat, but Fedora is a little more separate from them than Ubuntu is from Canonical.

I tried Debian, but it’s not easy to get up and running on a more modern laptop or desktop without a lot of tweaking and kernel mods. It’s a good base OS but not good out of the box desktop OS. Same issue with Arch based distros.

Whatever you choose you should enable zram! It’s a Linux kernel module so available on all distros. It makes a compressed partition on the ram.

I’ve had a ThinkPad with 8 GB of ram and it was night and day with zram enabled. Just used the defaults, no more stutter or hanging for minutes. I used Tumbleweed.

Fedora Atomic, GNOME or KDE will give you a system where you set it up and forget it.

Fedora is a good bet, it’s really up to date and should simultaneously be stable.

I use endeavouros (Arch) gnome variant because I need a working distribution in Mainland China with an additional emulated deepin application or two (I hate tinkering with wine or bottles). But otherwise I’d be using Fedora.

I like gnome. I’d say KDE second. Fedora workstation does gnome and there’s the kde variant of course.

I still like Ubuntu, as long as everything works, I recommend getting the LTS release.

I would go Debian for stability.

I like fedora since it updates a little more frequently than Debian, but it isn’t a full on rolling release. I used opensuse tumbleweed for a while and it broke on me several times.

I also used arch for a while, but I’m a dad to young children and I just don’t have the time to fuck around with my OS anymore. When I have time to work on my personal dev projects, I just want to drop into tmux, launch neovim and go. After some distro hopping I landed on Fedora with KDE for my desktop and gnome on my laptop. I also have an old netbook running antix with iceWM and an old thinkpad running fedora i3. The latter 2 machines are my hard focus machines.

I recently installed Fedora on my own 2-in-1 flippy laptop, and it works well. The screen rotates when I rotate the device, touchscreen works, and the stylus works as well.

If you want stability, you probably can’t beat Debian, and you should be fairly used to the backend by now. I suspect the stylus use is just going to be figuring out what package provided your current access to it.

Before you wipe the laptop, I would recommend finding a command to list all the installed packages, then at least you’ll have a reference to what was in place before. And if possible, maybe grab a backup of the /etc folder (or whatever might still be accessible) so you can reference the current configs on various packages to recreate whatever doesn’t work by default.

There are a number of lightweight desktops you can choose from. I personally like Mate, but maybe you can play around with others on the new system and purge the ones you don’t like. And while you’re swapping drives, check the memory slots, maybe you can drop another 8GB stick in there to give the whole system a boost.

Recently install Fedora 42 KDE on one of those weird laptops with a pen - everything just works, no tinkering.
Looking at your specs - I have almost the same config, except in place of SATA SSD I installed a NVMe SSD, if course the laptop needs to support that. KDE Plasma is superior in the touch support, although the screen keyboard is a little buggy at times. But the situation in the GNOME ecosystem is a bit worse for touch/pen devices. Good luck

If you’re seeking something simple to use where you may never need to open the terminal, I’d say ZorinOS(Lite).

You can also test out Debian if you don’t mind a bit of tinkering on the terminal. You’ll have to add yourself as a user to the sudoers list first thing but there are plenty of 2-second video tutorials on how.

For both distros, if you are searching for support, you’d search “on Ubuntu” and basically the same would apply.

Slackware!

There’s no big difference between ubuntu, mint or debian. I am not sure why people try to sell it to you.

Look up if fedora silverblue supports your stylus. Create a live image and test it. If it works, install it. If not fedora, then opensuse aeon.

I have a Lenovo Flex with Aurora, which is a version of Fedora Atomic with “batteries installed” (nonfree libraries included) and a KDE desktop.

If you prefer Gnome that version is Bluefin.

The advantage of an atomic/immutable distro is that it’s effectively impossible to break, but you can’t tinker with the internals like you would a regular distro. And that’s still with fresh packages hot from the oven about once a week.

I just went through this. LMDE: Linux Mint Debian Edition. It’s Mint without Ubuntu and it’s pretty great.

Debian proper. You’ll have issues with any stylus on Linux. Not to say it won’t work but may need more effort to get working.