It’s not harmful, but it really depends on what roles you’re trying to land.

I usually recommend going for A+ then Network+, then Linux+ for new technicians at data centers.

If you’re worried about interviewing, I can say from the other side of the table that actual projects and working through issues shows experience more clearly than simply studying for and passing a cert. Even something simple like setting your desktop/server to be the DHCP server (instead of the router being the DHCP server)

I installed from one flash drive with the image (on ventoy) to another flash drive that was plugged in to be the boot drive. On a cheap USB2 drive, it’s unusably slow - so make sure you use the fastest drive you can

I don’t use VRR, but I meet the rest of your criteria

Electron apps were the biggest pain pont - I would be typing in discord and there was noticeable lag and letters would disappear until I have several characters beyond them. I worked around this by using discord on their website in a browser tab.

Not sure which update resolved this, but it’s now working as I expect it to, so I think if you choose to use a Nvidia GPU, you should have an okay time. I would just say to consider a beefier AMD GPU as well, since they tend to have much better driver support in Linux

Looks like an ISA card to me - might be RAM, but I’m not confident at all