The speaker popping thing was so weird! It happened with anything plugged into the built-in 3.5mm jack, and it happened A LOT. It’s normal to hear that while first booting or shutting down, but Fedora did it like a LOT. The machine is a Lenovo Tiny, so it’s nice hardware. I have replicated the pops in Catchy now on another (identical) Lenovo Tiny, but only when it dims the screen for power-save mode. Solution: no more power save mode hahaha.
I didn’t even consider printer! I have a laserjet on my network, I’ll have to set that up on each of my distros and see how they handle it!