

I feel your pain 😅🫠
Yeah, just to add another confirmation to the other comments, if you have a separate home partition you can reuse it with a new / partition and expect it to work fine. The only stuff that gets saved in your home folder is comfiguration files for your apps, along with whatever actual files you have stored. You can even swap distros (Ubuntu/Arch) and keep your home folder, though sometimes the config files and settings don’t translate perfectly.
I don’t know man, those are some strange behaviors. Can’t say I’ve experienced any of them. There does seem to be a common theme of slow and delayed responses, that is almost certainly a hardware issue from my experience, but that doesn’t line up with the specs you mention.
Regarding the privilege issues, running a general user without superuser privileges is a standard practice for Linux. You can change your user to a superuser though, there are plenty of walkthroughs available to accomplish that. That will keep you from having to run sudo, doas or enter your password as often. Some things will always require a passcode though, as that’s just what the best practices of the tech landscape indicate.