If you’re pursuing a MSc, your effort should be spent on the study itself, not on tinkering (e.g. I saw some recommended a Framework laptop). So my wholehearted recommendation is a Thinkpad + Fedora for maximum usability, stability, and durability. Thinkpad speakers are usually bad though. And Thinkpad is not particularly good for gaming, either.
Also excited for this. I tried KDE before but I didn’t find it easy to configure (too manually for a declarative guy like me). I like more the simplicity of Gnome.
I hate Google but they gave us Go, Kubernetes. I hate Amazon but they gave us AWS. I plainly hate those companies, but adore the brilliant engineers that work there.