I have the Framework 13 and am currently running the COSMIC alpha on Pop!_OS. I love my current setup, but have tried Fedora Kinoite as well, and also had a great experience. Apart from running a few commands to get the fingerprint reader working, I haven’t really had to troubleshoot anything. Its been a solid experience from Day 1.
It helped me tremendously in college, and I still use it today, both for past knowledge retention, as well as learning some new things. It is an incredible tool.
As far as the learning curve goes, I would recommend this: just use it as is. You can dive down a rabbit hole of optimizing your learning approach and adding the right extensions, but that time is better spent just studying what you want to learn.
Use the Cloze format, keep cards limited to a couple sentences at most, and practice daily for a couple minutes, and you can’t go wrong.