I saw this website that is trying to help evaluate projects to see if they live up to their claims of being free / open source: https://isitreallyfoss.com/

I’m using PopOS Cosmic alpha (not based on Gnome) on my new laptop and like it a lot so far. It has a few rough edges, but nothing I’d switch to something else over. (In fact, I did use the Gnome version of Cosmic until my previous laptop broke.)