NewOldGuard [he/him, they/them]

Normally I’d recommend mint, pop, or fedora, but since you want to switch it up and are looking for “windows with sex appeal,” you could look into AnduinOS. It’s just an Ubuntu reskin made to look like windows 11, so it should have the stability and compatibility of Ubuntu. What makes it interesting to me though is that the lead dev actually works at Microsoft, so that lends it some legitimacy compared to other skins

Default Fedora workstation and Silverblue do it this way. First boot prompts you to create an account and set it up, then lands you on the desktop and asks if you want a tour of the UI

I don’t have experience with dual GPU laptops but from what I’ve heard PopOS handles them really well. They also have an image with the nvidia drivers preinstalled which should make the setup process straightforward

Edit: I also found this github repo which documents some fixes for issues on that device specifically. Not sure how many of these have been patched upstream by now but it’s worth checking out.