IMO, go with either Fedora Workstation or Pop! OS (I would probably lean towards Pop! OS since its your first experience with Linux)

Beware brave traveler, you are asking questions that may result in a journey you did not wish to embark.

To be fair…you have the ability to fix this yourself by hosting your own instance.

I know you stated wanting to run it on bare metal, but why not docker containers with a compose file? Would keep your system clean.

Interesting. I’m using Jerboa right now and while I have a few complaints, scrolling speed isn’t one of them. I wonder if it’s a phone specific issue.