There's already a thousand comments, but I'll give my opinion anyway. Debian is by far the most reliable distro I have ever used. It's easier to install than arch in my opinion, and is completely rock solid. However, if you have at least a year experience with linux and you like tinkering, nothing beats arch. I don't recommend using distros like pop_os, endevour os, or manjaro, simply because once you have a bit of experience, it just introduces more points of failure.
Well, yes, in some cases, but the start menu is something you interact with very often. The average user (and I mean office worker in their 40s)doesn't even pin items to the taskbar. As such, the main way to open apps is through the start menu. Think about this way. In this situation on a laptop, you either save ram or battery. Constant cpu spikes aren't good for energy efficiency. This also means hogging your ssd, which might be an issue in specific situations. On the other side, keeping the start menu fully in ram could be perceived as a waste, it really depends on how often you use the start menu and how much you value energy efficiency.
I think it is worth noting, dma desing became rockstar north, it isn't a separate studio. The same Lezlie Benzies wrote the story for all of them. Still, I'm pretty sure he left some time ago, same with Lazlow. I still have high hopes for GTA VI though.
Thing is, before battleye, gta online worked perfectly. I played it for years on every remotely popular linux distro, from debian, to ubuntu, linux mint, fedora etc. It's just the fucking anticheat.
Well, on most distros, the live image is loaded onto ram. Thus, whenever you restart, you lose everything. You could install linux on a usb, but thats incredibly slow, in my experience. If you could detail your problem, maybe we can help you fix it, instead of applying an ineffective bandage.
My whole life I thought that an acidic cleaner is your best bet