Most phoronix articles are pretty much straight to the point actually. I haven’t regularly visited them in a while but they were a good source for open source news, and might still be.

If you haven’t checked out Pop!_OS I’d recommend giving it a try. While I’m using a system76 laptop so they guarantee hardware compatibility, it’s been one of the smoothest and most functional DE/guis I’ve used. Ive never had to resort to a command line* and aaalllmost everything you’d expect to find exists in the gui.

*caveat. Except for some really esoteric problems, which are usually a result of my own tinerking