Just got 2 of these a few days ago and am super happy with them. The firmware it comes with is essentially OpenWRT with a fancier UI so that means that you can use an OpenWRT sysupgrade image to flash it to OpenWRT with no issues. WiFi6 and Hardware Flow Offloading (HFO) are super nice features of this particular router. Downside is that it has 4 1G LAN ports and 2 2.5G (1 WAN, 1 WAN/LAN) ports, so you're kind of stuck with gigabit.
In 2020 when I was upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, a similar thing happened to me where the upgrade simply froze for 1 hour and upon rebooting the whole installation was fucked. This was the 3rd time when this happened over the years (I've been using Ubuntu on and off since 2008). I'd finally had it with Ubuntu and I quickly flashed a USB drive with ArchLinux, used it to salvage the data from my broken installation ,since my /home partition was still intact and then switched to Arch as a daily driver. Have had very little problems since
On Linux I've configured the OS to hibernate when I close the lid instead of sleeping. With today's SSD speeds, waking up from hibernation instead of sleep only adds 5-10s. Unless you're constantly opening and closing your laptop lid, that shouldn't affect your daily routine that much
Have you considered using a password manager? With 1Password I'm able to save all logins for my AWS accounts and then just select the appropriate one when logging in.
I started smoking at 13 and quit at 22 cold turkey. 8 years later, I still sometimes dream at night about lighting a cigarette and it feels ecstatic when I do. Then I wake up and spend the entire day craving a smoke. The hook runs deep.