Ubuntu was a nice base in that it provided all the drivers and stuff like that built-in (I had a desktops with Arch for about a decade, and my previous memory of laptops was hunting for drivers on Arch in like 2011. It was kind of a pain, so I switched to Ubuntu for this laptop. I’m not sure whether that was the right decision, though).

Good luck with the crash! FWIW, there’s an Xorg and a Wayland version of Ubuntu’s desktop environment, maybe try flipping over to the other one just to see if that does anything.