It seems your choices are:
1) Ubuntu 18.04, installed directly and not somehow updated from 16.04 as you did (which may be why ALSA never ended up working in 18.04 for you as it did for Glen). I know you had difficulty trying to install 18.04, but it's probably your best bet, so it's worth figuring out.
2) Debian.
3) Kali, of all things?
The last 2 options, I don't like. I tried Debian once, and that's enough for me. If I want a distro that's not user friendly, I'll go with Arch because at least it doesn't pretend that it's user friendly.
Plus I'd get the benefit of the Arch repos.
Kali seems to be aimed at hackers, and not meant to be used as an OS that you'd be using for daily tasks. I'd bet it would be a pain in various ways for you to use and/or configure/modify. I'm guessing Kali was chosen because hackers want to use small laptop computers for hacking (Chromebook is one) and Kali about as lightweight a distro as you can get while also being aimed at hackers.