Lightweight distro for IT student: coding, light gaming, design tools (Figma/Canva), office, and editing - PopOS vs PikaOS vs CachyOS?

[Athx.]

Hey everyone, I'm a IT student switching to Linux for my coursework and personal projects. I need a distro that's lightweight but powerful enough for my workflow.
My specs:

• CPU: AMD Athlon Gold 3150G
• iGPU: Vega 3
• dGPU: Radeon 530
• RAM: 8GB (4GB 2400MHz + 4GB 3200MHz)
• Storage: SSD (OS) + HDD (data)

My use cases:

• Programming/coding (coursework & personal projects)
• Office work (writing, presentations, spreadsheets)
• Design tools (Figma, Canva for UI/UX and graphics)
• Light gaming
• Daily browsing/productivity
• Video/graphic editing

My current options:
I've been looking at PopOS, PikaOS, and CachyOS. They seem like good middle grounds—lightweight enough for my laptop but still feature-rich. However, I'm not sure which handles my specific workload best.
Questions:

1. Which of these three would you recommend for my use case?
2. Any known issues with Radeon 530 drivers on these distros?
3. Would 8GB RAM be sufficient for coding + design tools + light gaming simultaneously?
4. Are there any other distros you'd suggest that might be better suited?

I appreciate any guidance! Thanks in advance.

 

[NicWelds]

Any distro with a lightweight desktop environment would probably work just fine.

The only one of the three you mentioned that I've used personally is Pop! OS. It worked fine on my old laptop with 4gb of ram and an i3 processor. I basically used it to log in to an MMO game for semiautomatic/AFK activities.

Whether or not 8gb of ram is enough for gaming plus multitasking depends on what game/program combination you'll be using. Since the system requirements for both of those things vary so much it's impossible to really say.

I used Xubuntu for a few years which is an Ubuntu flavor with the Xfce desktop environment. It's one of the lighter of the Ubuntu flavors. It worked well for the kind of gaming that I did.

I recently switched to Debian with Awesome WM instead of a full desktop environment. I'm not sure how much easier that is on system resources but it boots in a quarter of the time.

 

[theLegionWithin]

I recently had CachyOS installed on a mini pc based on a Celeron N5105 (a little slower than your amd) w/ 4gb ram and it did a passable job w/ browsing and other low-performance tasks. I've never tried editing video or compiling on something that slow so I dunno there.