Its fwupd which does the firmware updates , gnome software access it for updates . The cli version is fwupdmgr.

Mint has a more noob friendly approach with almost everything having a ui and it is Ubuntu under the hood so there wouldn’t be extra to learn after switching. Popularity wise mint is one of the best stable distros with Ubuntu as its base with community support as well so if you have doubts you can most probably find the answer just by searching

In college right now 2yr computer science, anything Microsoft is a pain to work offline. I miss the onedrive sync in windows i just use syncthing for that now .

I use onlyoffice since it has one of the best Microsoft office compatibility though I submit my obsidian export as a pdf for my assignments or records.

If you really need ms office or for group projects and you have an o365 account, just use the web version for it.

There is blendOS which is an arch based immutable distro similar to Vanilla OS with different DE options