In the footnotes they mention GPT-3.5. Their argument for not testing 4 was because it was paid, and so most users would be using 3.5 - which is already factually incorrect now because the new GPT-4o (which they don't even mention) is now free. Finally, they didn't mention GPT-4 Turbo either, which is even better at coding compared to 4.
You can sill use Medicare to create the USB and then add your favorite antimalware rescue CD to it, like the Kaspersky/Avira ones, but if it's an unknown malware you'd have to use other analysis tools like Sysinternals RootkirRevealer, Autoruns etc. If you want to fix Windows stuff then it's best to get a WinPE-based live CD with these tools, like Sergei Strelec, Gandalf etc.
Medicat USB has a few hardware diagnostics tools on it. It's based on Ventoy, so it's more like a collection of ISOs as opposed to a single distro.
This has nothing to do with Arch or Bazzite, it's actually a bug in recent kernels. Switching to Mint only fixed it for you because Mint uses an old kernel.
The fix/workaround is to enable "above 4G decoding" and "resizable BAR" in your BIOS. If your BIOS does not have these options, you can either downgrade to an earlier kernel (or OS image if you're on Bazzite), or switch to a patched kernel like the Cachy kernel.
Is that all? Will that remove all the traces of arch?
There will be some other minor dot files in your /home which you might want to review, like .bashrc, .bash_profile, .profile etc. These should be mostly harmless, but if you don't recall customising them, then yeah free to nuke all the dot files. Also be aware that some programs also leave their configs outside the .config folder, like Firefox might have a .mozilla folder, GTK programs might create a .themes folder, vim has .vim. So you might want to review and delete these as well, if you want a clean config.
As for the last step - just before you boot into your new distro, you might to get rid of the Arch/Endeavour entries from your ESP/UEFI. Run efibootmgr to see your current UEFI boot entries, then nuke the entries using efibootmgr --delete-bootnum -b #.
And to get rid of the GRUB configs, delete your <ESP>/EFI/grub folder. I'm guessing your /boot is on your root partition? If not then you'll also need to delete /boot/grub.
Now when you install your next distro, you should get a nice and clean GRUB install.
1. No
2. You'll need to delete your ~/.config, ~/.local, ~/.cache ( and maybe ~/.var, which is your Flatpak app data/cache). Might be best to rename your .config instead of outright deleting it, just in case you need to restore some old config.
3. It's been a while since I used Nobara, but IIRC it only creates the default @ and @home subvolumes.
4,5. Nobara should have Timeshift installed by default.
Honestly though, since you said that you want something that "just works" for gaming and coding, you should just get Bazzite. Bazzite is an immutable distro and everything is set up to work out-of-the-box. You never have to worry about broken updates again due to atomic updates and image rollbacks. You can directly boot from a previous image from GRUB (no need to restore it first), pin known good images to your GRUB, and even rollback to any previous image via the web (upto 90 days) - all with just a single command. And for coding, you can easily set up a Distrobox container to install all your tools and IDEs etc, it integrates well with the host OS so you won't even notice/care that it's inside a container.
This was in fact what prompted my search - the Gnome calculator is so horribly bloated, and yeah, it should have no business making network connections, at least not by default - this should be an opt-in behaviour.
It's r/w, if you specify the filesystem type as ntfs3. I believe if you use just ntfs it'll be read-only, to mimic the behaviour of the old driver, for compatibility reasons.
Mine looks like this:
UUID=blah /media/games ntfs3 uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=000,rw,user,exec,nofail,nocase,windows_names 0 0
If you're copy-pasting this, make sure your uid and gid matches of course.
But the key thing for Steam is you need to have your compatdata folder on a Linux partition, because Proton creates folders with invalid characters (like :). windows_names would prevent that of course, and thus prevents corruption, but it would cause Proton to fail since if can't create those folders/files. So you'll need to symlink that folder on your NTFS disk to point to a folder on a Linux partition.
Eg:
$ mkdir -p ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata
$ ln -s ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata /media/games/Steam/steamapps/
Of course, before you run the above, you'll need to delete the existing compatdata folder from the NTFS disk.
ElementaryOS doesn't work on Apple Silicon, so that's not an option.