I ended up having the opposite experience; I went and installed Pop on my non-System76 workstation.
It is basically just Ubuntu, with a custom desktop environment (that is actually perfectly fine although optional), but more importantly, ppas for up-to-date NVIDIA drivers and CUDA.
It's sort of like if a machine learning person installed Ubuntu on their workstation, did all the configuration work to get it working with their GPUs, and then turned that into a distro.
It is basically just Ubuntu, with a custom desktop environment (that is actually perfectly fine although optional), but more importantly, ppas for up-to-date NVIDIA drivers and CUDA.
It's sort of like if a machine learning person installed Ubuntu on their workstation, did all the configuration work to get it working with their GPUs, and then turned that into a distro.