Lazier way:

:w !sudo tee %

It’s surprisingly possible (and easy) too… a little bit of tinkering with X11’s compositor API would probably do the trick.

IDK about Wayland tho :/

LMDE and PopOS are my consistent recommendations to newcomers. If one doesn’t work, the other will.

I use Nix, so I’ll just reinstall my system if anything really bad ever happens. Sometimes I reinstall just because. My important files are on a delegate drive I have to manually mount, so I’m not too worried.