As much as I appreciate projects like Linux Mint improving portability for projects like GTK (against GNOME's wishes), Linux Mint and PopOS have a similar dependency issue of being dependent on Ubuntu. To what degree each project is I don't know, but personally I'd use something that is either entirely independent (Alpine, Void, Gentoo, Devuan, Debian, etc), or at the very least not a fork of a fork (especially in Ubuntu's case with how many poor decisions Canonical are making in regards to proprietary repositories and telemetry).
Devuan or Debian aren't exactly hard to set up with a similar environment and interface to Ubuntu, and otherwise function in a very similar fashion, so if you want something like Ubuntu without the shittification, use one of those.
EDIT: A commenter pointed out that LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) also exists, which is a Debian-forked version of Linux Mint, rather than Ubuntu forked.
I ran Ubuntu for a couple of years, and then I switched to PopOS because I didn't like the direction that Ubuntu was going.
imo Pop takes everything that made Ubuntu great and makes it better. It's not bleeding edge though, but it is stable if that's what you're looking for.
I recently made the switch over to an Arch based distro for the first time ever (Garuda Linux is the distro) and I've absolutely loved that change too. I feel like Garuda at least, I can't speak for all Arch based distros, but Garuda is very user friendly, sleek with KDE apps including Plasma, and very powerful. I like to game on my laptop and have definitely noticed some framerate increases after switching to Garuda.
Biggest difference between Ubuntu and Pop is that Ubuntu aims to popularise usage of snap and uses apt as a backup option while Pop aims to deliver its software through apt and flatpaks, in the priority that the user wants.
Flatpaks are more consistent to run, they can run between all distros but install dependencies seperately so could take up more space for installations.
Apt makes use of the native debian installation, which works well for most but sometimes you could be stuck in a dependency hell between some software. Uses the storage more efficiently as it can share dependencies between multiple installed packages.
Snap sucks. There's literally no point in using it. It can run apps on all distros similarly to flatpak but its worse in every possible way. It hits noticably to run time of applications.
I used to disagree with you on snap... Until it horribly horribly failed me. No way to revert, I remember reading pages that were essentially "just reinstall your os". Noooope. Flatpak all the way now.
Popos has removed everything canonical including apt repos and ubuntu pro. Popos devs are competent, have implemented a tiling window manager, userland scheduler to improve game performance. You get the compatibility of ubuntu without the bullshit
It's hard to make direct "better" or "worse" comparisons between distros. Each has it's advantages and disadvantages. They're really similar and offer similar beginner-friendly experiences. I disliked that popOS doesn't use Grub, I ran into issues getting the bootloader to show my windows drive.
I never liked the look and feel of Ubuntu. My first Linux server experience was running Minecraft servers off of Ubuntu. Try it out and see what you like better. Thats all that matters.
Yes. But that's highly subjective, as I fucking hate Ubuntu and the direction it has taken. I don't mind distros that are based on Ubuntu, though, so based on that I'd go for Pop rather than stock Ubuntu.
No. Only one, but I'm sure I'd have to deal with the same in other distros: New laptop last year with Nvidia 4060 -> Needs a relatively new driver -> needs a relatively new kernel, newer than what the OS provides as default.
I had to experiment for a while to find a combination of nvidia driver and kernel version that worked well. Took me at least a few hours to sort everything out.