I would say the following:

• Encrypt with a strong password 3+ word (your password manager should help you with this) for FDE
• for admin account (root), if there is a way to disable it in the setup configuration menu, disable it. Its recommended to use sudo when you need elevated perms rather than su root.
• backup all your files to an external drive, you can use rsync,rclone sync, or other items to do this. FreefileSync as well.
• before you switch over, run a flatpak list --columns=application to output all the flatpaks you have installed. This way you dont have to try to remember what you had installed
• Gnome software center is a bit slow and laggy, at least my experience on Pop! and Debian. I would recommend just using cli for apt installs and/or dpkg installs.

For the flatpak output, i would recommend the following script to help download all automatically:

flatpak_packages=(
	com.calibre_ebook.calibre
        all flatpaks listed here
)

flatpak_install(){
	for i in "${flatpak_packages[@]}"
	do
		echo "Installing $i"
		flatpak install --user flathub "$i" -y
	done
}

This will go through each flatpak and install it for you, saying yes to all so you don’t have to do anything. Don’t forget to run:

sudo apt install flatpak -y
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists --user flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

That’s my brain dump at the moment lol. Lmk if you have any questions.

I wasn’t aware of the full impact of -z. Thanks for clarifying that for me (thanks to @hades@feddit.uk as well!). I’ll definitely keep an eye on the speed with -z vs without it when I do my next dry run.

Thanks for sharing! glad to see the --delete item being the key.