I ended up not installing Linux on my laptop last week. I'm second-guessing my distro choices. Maybe I should run something Ubuntu-based (Kubuntu or give Mint a second chance - I don't know why it was so unstable on that one computer) instead.

Also, I learned that virt-manager passes your clipboard history to the guest OS.

@Iti, as a life-long windows user who has only deployed software to linux servers, but has kept himself away from devops work, I found Fedora KDE surprisingly fluent for me.

Just 2 cents or additional single datapoint for making your decision process more complicated. 😁

I was planning on Fedora KDE, but Copr doesn't seem to have as much in it as Ubuntu PPAs. That probably isn't a problem for me, but it was enough to make me hesitate. On EndeavourOS (based on Arch), I've only used the AUR for AviSynth+ and plugins, which was a miserable failure (an extreme case of dependency hell). On Ubuntu, I was using PPAs for newer versions of packages than the official repository, which won't be a problem for Fedora.

For AviSynth+, the easy way out would be to try running it in Wine or switch the big Ryzen to Windows. That CPU is a waste as a web browsing machine anyway, but it's also currently located in a room next to the non-climate-controlled garage. I don't like how Windows has background processes that make the CPU hit its power limit (88W, but with the I/O die and motherboard peripherals added on, total system power consumption hits 130W) while Task Manager shows no significant CPU usage (even in the individual core chart).

Tried the PWM adapter GPU cable to connect the Arc A310 to the mainboard fan system. The trick works of course but even the sound of a fixed RPM speed is worse than the variable sound of the original video card bad fan management. At 30-40% speed (and already much noise is generated) with a GPU bench the GPU temp get high fast passing 70°C in few minutes.. the UEFI bios doesn't see the PCIE card sensor so it cannot be used on my Gigabyte mainboard.
So I got back to its own PWM connector and will wait for another useless firmware upgrade to see if things get better.