My work machine now regularly black screens for up to 30 seconds then comes back.

Almost certainly driver, sometimes a failing dock or cable though.

The Adobe Acrobat reader we are forced to use is now so bloated that it freezes the whole machine for up to a minute.

That’s just adobe products. They’re great for subscription revenue for adobe.

I switched to fedora for work myself and onlyoffice is handling my current pdf needs, works great and FOSS. Can save to DOCX and everything… and the same program handles those too.