Honestly same. I ended up switching to mint. Tired of fussing with it

Cosmic desktop has been neat but it definitely needed more time to bake before hitting the general release. Just last weekend I did an update that dropped me to the emergency terminal and took half a day to repair. Pop was my go to "it just works" but right now I can't in good consciousness recommend it for average users, especially gamers. Hell I still have to drop to gnome to play half my games, and the other half usually have visual bugs that I've tinkered with for ages. I'm sure it will stabilize, but they should have kept it on the beta branch for longer.

I'm not experiencing any of these issues. Did you make any unique configuration changes recently other than the updates?

That's doesn't sound good. I have been running pop-os24.04, updating all the time and haven't run into any issues. I switched over from Ubuntu when CosmicDE beta released. Are you running on the the newer pop-os 24.04 w/ CosmicDE or the older pop-os22.04 with GnomeShell? I can't speak for the older GnomeShell version but, if you are running the newer CosmicDE Epoch1.11 than I would say you should expect everything to be running very stable even if some features are not complete yet. If you are running the CosmicDE Epoch1.11 and having these issues you describe, I would suspect some sort of hardware issue like memory. Most distro install images come with a memtest option on their usb live boot installer. Since you are on the brink of distro hopping, might be worth creating a live boot usb thumbdrive and running the memtest or just booting into the live desktop and exercising that. Either would be a good way to see if there is some sort of hardware issue or if it's your currently installed OS. Hope this helps.

That sounds like a terrible experience. At first glance it also sounds like a hardware issue but updating anything with an Ubuntu base was always painful to me.

It would help if you gave a little bit more info (like logs), without it, this is my blind guess:

• 1, 2 points to a storage drive on your system
• 5 points to your system drive specifically, that some parts of the drive are failing. Although I would expect that to happen with HDDs, not SSD
• 3 has logs, you can switch to the detail screen during the shutdown splash by hitting Esc? Or maybe a different one on Ubuntu, don't remember. Should tell you which service doesn't want to stop (and if it's always the same one, if you check multiple times)
• As for 4 and 6...I cannot fathom how is that happening

It sounds like your ram or CPU is dying (or overheating)

I had a similar experience with pop, the freezing was unbearable. Many audio issues with pipewire, felt like everything was a fight and like I was searching for solutions more than enjoying the OS. Much happier having switched, the enthusiasm returned immediately.