Sorry to hear your not having a great experience. As a reminder, this applies - Supported Distros.
The most polished experiences will be listed here. GNOME desktop.
Am I reading this correctly, you are trying 24.10? I ask as this is not released yet, not even in Beta yet. It’s a daily build release and will have tons of bugs that may need to be ironed out. While it may be fine on one laptop, it’s expected that to see bugs along the way on some configurations as it’s not a supported (or even released) distro.
While I have not touched XFCE in eons, ideally, Xubuntu 24.04 might be worth trying. Note, I believe it’s still using X and not Wayland. Still, this may provide a better experience. But it does differ some from Ubuntu 24.04, and user experiences with Xubuntu have been mixed.