No idea about AMD but I have nvidia 3070 and works just fine. I use gnome for gaming and kde works well too. No settings changed, simple archinstall script with nvidia proprietary drivers and steam.

I’m not sure why but xfce multi screen gaming is problematic, haven’t dived into it.

Not saying don’t get AMD but nvidia has horrible reputation which is kinda unfair nowadays. Their driver has improved a lot.

Not to be “that guy”, but you can use a gui file manager to access your files the same way you do so in windows. Most of them support ssh keys as well. If you’d like to check out the cli stuff, nnn or ranger can be useful. Something like midnight as abckup is good too. Definitely install fzf on both your vps and local machine. You can also go over board and run xorg over ssh and run a small window manager, maybe awesomewm or even xfce (not that small but works fine).

I’ve gotten a lenovo legion 5 for something around 1600$, with a 3070 rtx on it. Before that I had another legion as well, with 2060. I’ve gotten intel both times, my friend got the amd one. Why? They are a bit cheaper than the competition and I don’t really understand why asus version of essentially the same hardware costs more. Why not a linux oriented company instead of lenovo? Well linux isn’t as out of reach as it was 10 or even 5 years ago. Almost every driver you need is available even if you do a clean arch install out of the box. So why get a device that you can’t easily sell later on, won’t get god warranty services overseas and might be hard to repair in a pinch?

All this to say, get whatever you like. I think even on a macbook you can get a perfectly fine linux setup. I hate it when people assume linux needs to run on something specific and is out of reach. Get what you like at whatever price range you want, you’d be hard pressed to run into an issue installing and using linux on it.

I’ve gamed, developed web and android apps, patched kernel on asus rog series, lenovo legion series, some random msi model and a base configuration acer model. Almost zero problems.