As much as I like Fedora, I tend to agree with this. THis new laptop is also running coreboot, rather than the traditional BIOS. I *was* going to try to dual boot with Pop!_OS and Fedora, but Pop! uses systemd-boot and Fedora uses grub. That, combined with the EFI boot partition, makes dual booting tricky. I'm learning my way around apt, so I think I'll be OK as far as work goes.
I never did like Gnome. When running Fedora, I'd install the server edition, and add in xfce. I tried to avoid gnome stuff as much as possible. Even in Pop! I installed KDE and I log into that rather than Gnome.
I've never had an issue with LibreOffice. No one in my office can tell the difference between my docs and theirs. But I don't use overly complicated features either. Mine are pretty basic. :)
Just for fun and interest - can you post
cat /proc/cmdline
to see if there’s any special tricks being done there?