I had a dual gpu Dell Xps laptop a couple of years ago, and the best experience I had with it was PopOS. It was the only distro that worked with that laptop out of the box without just completely disabling the dgpu.

You can’t get around not having a VPN if you don’t want your ISP to know you are doing. Sounds like you might not have a complete idea of what exactly a VPN is doing and why you need one.