The sluggishness you experienced has a lot to do with Ubuntu itself. At its base it’s a very good OS, but canonical is messing up on the details.
Ubuntu derivatives like Linux Mint or PopOS have spent a lot of time resolving this. They perform very well for most and have got excellent stability because their software stack is a little older.
For gaming, fedora is probably the base OS that most prefer at the moment. It’s at a good balance point of stability the latest tech.
The other option if you want to go more bleeding edge is Manjaro, but expect some things to break on occasion.
I don’t know Blender, but from experience I found that Manjaro/arch is a bit too bleeding edge for production use. Especially when it comes to non-gaming graphics. I experienced a lot of problems with Manjaro and GPU acceleration in video editing suites. All got solved when I switched to Linux Mint.
Similarly Zorin OS 17 has been good to me. I really like their approach to the Gnome UI (i.e. they kept the newest tech, and removed the space wasting UI components.
The Ubuntu based distros typically have fewer bugs as they typically have an older base.
Fedora is also a decent middle ground.
I would suggest logging a ticket or forum post with Blender on this. It could be a blender bug or a graphics bug, but they would be the best people to advise.