I personally haven’t ever had it that difficult. My laptop has an nvidia card running mint and is dual booting with Windows with no issues. I’ve previously setup an encrypted Ubuntu on an external drive that can be loaded on any computer without issues. I’ve used Bazzite on an all AMD modern gaming powerhouse, and Kinoite on two laptops with integrated graphics with no issues. Also KDE Neon on a crappy old HP Laptop with no issues.
So you may have done something wrong in the process of installation, maybe your USB drive was corrupted, or maybe you tinkered alittle too much while not knowing exactly what you were doing.
GL.iNet has a mesh router based on OpenWRT and supports WireGuard.
https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-b1300/
I have the Flint 2 and like it quite a lot but don’t have experience with this other router.