Check if bpm-power.com ships to your location, depending on the item they have decent prices. Based in Italy

The B650M is a smaller size and therefore has less features, but overall they seem similar. Biggest difference would be the integrated SSD heatsink and better VRM design + cooling of the non-M version. Also the second SSD slot being connected to the CPU instead of the chipset, if you ever want to put in two M.2 drives. One thing to watch out for is that both of these boards use a Realtek LAN chip which sometimes can be problematic with Linux.

VRMs (voltage regulator modules) are what bring the power to the CPU and these can get quite hot on high power processors. If you look around the socket on a motherboard, usually above and opposite the RAM, they are the big square/rectangle shaped components. Most high-performance motherboards have heatsinks on top of them to keep them from overheating, which your MB does not have.

Oh I know about alpine, sadly it didn’t “click” the same way void did and felt more like a distro to use in embedded systems or similar space constrained situations. Gentoo on the other hand I like, but the initial setup + waiting for stuff to compile put me off of it. Maybe I’ll try it again sometime with all precompiled packages.

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Void is my favourite distro, although I haven’t used it for a while. Extremely fast package manager, rolling release but not bleeding edge, super simple, very fun to tinker with (more than Arch imo). I stopped using it because I wanted something more popular for easier troubleshooting. But if I ever get a secondary PC/laptop I’ll probably start using it again.

Plymouth would be what you’re looking for. You’d have to find an XP theme or create one yourself.

I never see toffeeshare mentioned. P2P, encrypted, no size limit. Only problem is you can’t send folders, only files, but that’s easily solved with tarballs or RARs.

Not unintuitive, but thinking about it from a beginner standpoint, calamares-based systems are way easier to ‘get’. These distros don’t ask for domain names, proxies, usage surveys etc. This stuff isn’t that complicated, but they add an extra level of things you need to worry about if you’ve never used Linux before, which is the kind of person who this flow chart is made for.