that OS turned me off unless it has substantially improved since then
That was my experience with Pop!_OS too. I tried switching to it after finding that Ubuntu has a lot of bloat.
In the end, I went back to Ubuntu, because it works right out of the box - even with my Nvidia graphics card! (only from 20.04 onwards; 18.04 and older versions were problematic)
When I reinstalled Ubuntu, I chose the custom / minimal installation option, and that cut out most of the bloat.