SapphironZA

E5 for me. I soak and squeeze the crap out of the teebag.

A tip for everyone to get stronger tee. Put the teebag in a quarter cup of boiled water, then boil it in the microwave for 30 seconds, then add the rest of the water. It releases all the favour in the bag.

I don’t know Blender, but from experience I found that Manjaro/arch is a bit too bleeding edge for production use. Especially when it comes to non-gaming graphics. I experienced a lot of problems with Manjaro and GPU acceleration in video editing suites. All got solved when I switched to Linux Mint.

Similarly Zorin OS 17 has been good to me. I really like their approach to the Gnome UI (i.e. they kept the newest tech, and removed the space wasting UI components.

The Ubuntu based distros typically have fewer bugs as they typically have an older base.

Fedora is also a decent middle ground.

I would suggest logging a ticket or forum post with Blender on this. It could be a blender bug or a graphics bug, but they would be the best people to advise.

I would favour an AMD Ryzen 7000 based laptop. Much better battery life than Intel and better graphics performance.

Lenovo ThinkPad T and P series are excellent build quality.

Asus Zenbooks or Expertbooks with OLED screens are also excellent. Displays are on par, or superior to Macbooks. Excellent colour accuracy.

Make sure you get something with at least 16GB of Ram, or 32GB if available.

Apartheid, of a sort yes.

Genocide, not even close.

Oppression and occupational yes

Reach out to them and ask. The card is now yours, but the data is theirs.

I am sure if needed they can give you an online folder to upload the contents if needed.