This is funny because on a laptop I had I did this exact same progression - I started on Debian, but it didn’t have the right kernel version for my audio drivers, so I switched to Fedora, but it was running slowly (probably because of gnome, it lets you choose so this was my fault) so I moved to arch (with xfce) because it has a reputation for being relatively lightweight. It worked better, but it took longer to get working with the unusual chromebook hardware.
It wasn’t that new (2017), it just had weird hardware which iirc only recently got supported without proprietary drivers by the new audio system.