Sophienomenal

Okay, then mufasio’s comment may be more on track.

Hmm, what method did you use to back it up? It sounds to me like something got corrupted, though perhaps someone more experienced could identify a different issue. What I usually do to clone LUKS partitions is use a liveUSB (so no files change while backing up), then use cryptsetup to create a new LUKS partition on the backup drive if it’s a new drive (otherwise for incremental backups you can skip this step), then unlock both drives and rsync to the backup drive. This is also usually faster than pure cloning, as cloning would also copy the (encrypted) empty space in the partition, and for incremental backups, rsync will only copy the changed data so it’s much faster.

This would also have the benefit of preventing corruption on transfer, because rsync uses checksums to verify the file was properly reconstructed in the new location, whereas something like dd won’t have the granularity to check per-file checksums (especially if used to clone a whole encrypted partition).

I second that Nvidia is fine on Linux. I have an Asus gaming laptop with an Nvidia card that I use daily with no issues whatsoever, including in games (though do keep in mind some anticheat games blacklist Linux; that is not a compatibility issue, it is a conscious choice by the game makers, so not the fault of Linux). I recommend that anyone who is thinking about installing Linux checks their frequently played games on https://www.protondb.com/, and check any games they plan to buy there before purchasing them.

I’d also like to make a recommendation for a distro. If you want the easiest, practically no way to break it distro, I’d recommend Bazzite. You can select an option on download that includes the Nvidia drivers in the install so there are no extra steps to install them. It’s about as easy as it gets for gaming on Linux (it even comes with Steam preinstalled!). Find it at https://bazzite.gg/. It’s always what I recommend for Windows gamers thinking about switching to Linux (and choosing the KDE Plasma image bc it’s more Windows-like than GNOME). The other great part is that it’s immutable, so there is consistency across installs, it’s much harder to accidentally break, and you can roll back to a previous version in the bootloader if anything does break. Most things a person will want to install can be found in Flathub via the Discover app (or sometimes an AppImage), so most people wouldn’t really need to mess with rpm-ostree package overlays (tho they really aren’t difficult, but only use them as a last resort since it often makes updates a lot slower). I personally think that atomic distros are the most newcomer-friendly option out there. They just work, and they do so consistently. Unless you mess with package overlays, your exact root filesystem will be tested before an update is pushed, and bugs that do show up will typically be found quickly and fixed quickly due to the fact that the same bug will likely happen for everyone else (the exception is hardware-based or firmware-based issues, of course).

Just my 2 cents, having switched to Bazzite after over a decade on Linux, from Linux Mint, to Ubuntu, Manjaro, Arch, Void, Fedora Workstation, and Fedora Kinoite.

Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut has worked well for me. A quick Google search shows a standard AMD AM5 CPU IHS is 32×32mm, and the normal recommendation for that is a pea sized dot in the center. Given that you’re talking about a laptop CPU, the exposed die will be significantly smaller. A delidded i7-8700k, for instance, is 9.2x16.7mm, which is only 15% of the area, so you would use roughly 15% of a pea of thermal paste for that die size. Granted, I don’t know the actual die size of an i7-7500U, so take that with a grain of salt.

Here is an iFixIt guide on how to repaste a laptop. Do not forget to remove the old thermal paste (and do so with a lint free cloth)! They recommend using an amount of thermal paste the size of a grain of rice. That seems a little small to me, but then again, I only paste desktop processors. I expect someone else here may have more experience with laptops.