slackware followed by red hat mothers day 2.0 also used LMDE for several years

Agreed. As I say blender is less fast on amd. Atm

I don’t play games much. 0ad being the main exception.

But yeah I’d never advise a non blender user to go Nvidia.

Yeah. Unfortunately blender is still noticably faster on Nvidia cards. Due to cuda and optic support.

I only have a 4060 though. Next time I upgrade, give. How bad the 50s release is. I will look again and compare higher end amd stuff. Likely a few years away though.

i been linux only for over 30 years now.

I tend to use Debian stable. At least for the last 15 or so.

The reason is simple. I use it as my main PC and the stability is my main priority.

The only negative is software in the repos is often out of date.

But honestly while that was a pain in the past. Now for the vast majority of things I use. I find flat pack or appimage downloads work perfect ally.

The only exception is ham radio software. Here I tend to compile later versions if I need/want them.

Other negatives

I’m really not hugely into gaming. But use blender a lot. Due to this I use Nvidia cards as they are far better supported by blender.

Installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers is a bit of a pain on Debian for newbies. But once you know the process its simple enough. Just not obvious for beginners. The community drivers are still very limited thanks to Nvidia s weird ideas.

Nice to meet a fellow old fart linux user.

Yep, there are ways to do a full installation onto a thumb drive.

While It’s not exactly complex. It does tend to require more understanding of how file system mounting works than the audience OP is indicating would have.

It is likely time to create a user/id10t friendly app designed to download and fully install any ISO as a live thumb drive.

That will still need some help for odd hardware. But for most it would be a fair option.