The procedure is much hassle free than it looks. Keeping the secure boot on enrolled is a good practice. I read recently that Fedora was approving the sign automatically to be part of the gnome-software. So things may become even easier soon.

For Fedora you can follow the RPM Fusion documentation or have a look to this guide

Is this available in KDE?

I’d use a Steamdeck mini if was available. The current size for my needs makes me classify it as a non-portable. Hope the next version they have a smaller variant along with the larger one.

the Switch is a bit lighter

The Steamdeck needs an alternative version smaller and lighter. Hopefully we see a variant like this in the future releases

Maybe a laptop with a very good CPU and an eGPU? You can get it from Aliexpress.

Very good write up. If I not agree with all, I probably agree with most that is in here. On the DE section, I think we should help drive the beginner choice. In the recent past, KDE and Gnome were the early adopters of Wayland and the ones introducing the new features. They are also the choice of most distros. Therefore, I’d recommend one of those two.

I’d open a new section worth of scrutinies, dedicated about security. I believe it may worth advising that as a criteria of selection is recommended to not use distros that freezes regular releases for more than 1 year in desktop installations. Like is explained here. At least in your first distro selection. Advise about restricting privileged access with SELinux or AppArmor. Perhaps, also add a note about secure boot as well and some guide of how to harden your installation, Madaidans, Privacy Tweaks, PrivSec and PrivacyGuides.

Would like to know if this will be able to upgrade to use Thunderbolt 5 or USB 4 v2 for proper eGPU support in the future.

Doesn’t Nobara still not supporting Secure Boot and requiring it to be turned off for Nvidia support?

Kububtu is a good place to start, too. I notice that people recommend Ubuntu but some may be also including the other flavors when saying it. I think KDE is a nice DE, specially because of Dolphin.

I’ll sound a downer but it lost me on “Discord App”

I literally just tested Jerboa, Thunder and Voyager on my Android phone. Jerboa is ok, the UI was too immutable, like an IOS product. Thunder is a closer call to Voyager, it has a better search engine with more options but Voyager after tweaking has the best reading experience IMHO