I wouldn't go with Pop_OS with that hardware. The Nvidia GPU isn't supported by the new Nvidia driver and because System76 is hard at work writing Cosmic, their repositories are quite outdated. Support for things like Wayland is quite mediocre in the old drivers.

Switching to upstream (Ubuntu) with KDE would probably be more your speed.

I recently updated Pop OS to the Cosmic Alpha and it is much more to my liking than Gnome 3 ever was. I have an older Nvidia GPU though.

Par for the course with Gnome though, if you like customization, KDE is better.

As much as I'd like a machine like that, my 5 year old random Lenovo 10500 desktop is probably more useful as a daily driver machine than an older workstation class machine at the sacrifice of no ECC RAM. I bought it when it was 3 years old and will use it for 4 years then get rid of it before it hits the tail end, the power supply dies or something else goes wrong. You avoid all the weird problems, the depreciation, the energy costs running like that. And you gain things like relatively competent NVMe slots, USB-C and other luxuries. And the single core performance is better than Xeons of the era and earlier.

win11 ltsc works perfectly on it. With a solid background :D

Just make a black png and use it as the background?

Sure but why should a workaround be required for a feature that should work?

If they can't get colors to work, the software should just create the image itself and fake it.

It’s open source, I’ll “just write the code myself.”

go with gnome fedora! and rest will be history or debian stable.