I agree. In my experience, OpenSuse Tumbleweed has had the best experience running games, and let me tell you I’ve tried a lot of distros. Arch and its derivatives are fine if you’re careful with maintenance and read patch notes before updates, but IMO have too many stability issues for general purpose users. Debian and its derivatives often have outdated libraries. Sure, flatpak is a workaround, but OpenSuse hasnt needed workarounds and I’ve been able to play triple-A games on release day with minimal fuss.

Yep, they are real and they are useful. When data centers upgrade they flood the market with older tech which keeps the price of old xeons pretty low. Data centers care about performance per watt more than anything else and old processors are inefficient. Running one old CPU in your house wont make much of a difference to your power bill, but at datacenter scales that adds up to thousands upon thousands of watts.