As you already use Pop, why change? Is there something bothering, or something does not run well? How old is this laptop?

If you don’t feel like continuing with Pop, I’d try Debian as you value stability. It may be a slight pain to set up initially, but when it’s done it should generally Just Work until eternity. The expert installer allows you to enable non-free repos for any proprietary drivers by default.

Arch defaults to pipewire I think even if you select pulseaudio in archinstall (might have changed by now ofc) If your laptop is older pulseaudio might work much better (did for me)

Vscode and gitlens for routine stuff, and then just CLI when push comes to shove and I need some more advanced feature.

Wanna share more details? Sounds like something I should actually put on my 32gb