This thread title spoke to me, heyo
tldr long journey of mine: through a lot of iteration, I landed on Fedora/Sway. Sway is a tiling manager for Wayland – it’s a clone of i3, which is for Xorg.
There’s plenty of literature out there on Wayland and Xorg – Wayland is supposed to replace Xorg. It still has its rough edges, but it’s mostly there. Mainly, IME, getting screensharing to work may take some effort. XWayland provides backwards compatibility for X apps to run on Wayland. Keep in mind you can have both Xorg and Wayland installed to experiment/switch between the two. And well, you can do that with DEs as well. Install Gnome, KDE, i3, Sway, etc. all at once and try them all out for yourself 
I’ve been using btrfs with snapshots, so I can vouch that. Wayland and btrfs are Fedora defaults.
My unsolicited advice would be:
Just start 
One step at a time. Don’t overwhelm yourself. Little by little. The journey will probably be a long one as the rabbit hole can go very deep (but it’s worth it!). Since you have a month, and I’m assuming you need something stable for school, I’d say get to something stable in 2 weeks and then have 2 weeks to daily drive your setup to ensure stability. And please make sure you have backups and practice said backup strategy beforehand, especially if you’re prone to tinker.
Pitfalls on this hardware specific to Linux:
- Currently? None, really. IME all the hardware just works
edit: Oh wait, I kinda lied/forgot. There are pitfalls to this device that may skew towards Linux, ahem: mainly around battery/sleep, but that’s improved dramatically.
This is still a thing, though: Function (Fn) Keys Sticking + Fix for Linux
Linux software pitfalls:
- Browser VAAPI video/hardware decoding support is still shoddy. That’s on browser maintainers, though. VAAPI hardware decoding works through mpv, VLC, etc.
Wayland pitfalls:
- Browser/Electron app support is scattered.
- Screensharing support is scattered.
GLHF! And if you need something specific answered for Fedora/Sway/this laptop, lmk. I have mostly everything detailed in a document (that I need to find the time to cleanup to share). shrugs