Alright so after the motherboard of my windows machine crapped out and my laptop short circuited, I booted up my old server and... Ubuntu has gone to shit.
I'm late but going to second Artix. Their ISOs now ship with Xlibre and pipewire. Plus as mentioned they have a live ISO with a GUI installer because they're not elitist faggots.
This is/was a problem with the Kiwi Farms chat where it would leak memory. A lot of people reported this issue in the Technical Grievances thread, and some resorted to blocking the chat to prevent it. As I recall, Null did a few things at various times to mitigate the issue. It is likely not related to your choice of distro.