Thirded. As a writer, I'm currently using Aeon Timeline (https://timeline.app/) to track fictional timelines. It does a nice job of handling and displaying the data but it's fairly complex and not Markdown. An Obsidian plugin would be super useful in getting my workflow 100% Markdown.
Universal Blue (https://universal-blue.org/) takes the OCI-based Silverblue and extends it even further, including bluefin (https://universal-blue.org/images/bluefin/) which aims to provide an Ubuntu-like desktop experience for those of us who've given up on Ubuntu/Canonical.
As for Linux support, it's already there. There are papercuts, like needing a fairly recent kernel and certain packages (for the fingerprint reader), but it works fine, by all accounts.
I'm expecting my DIY edition to ship in the next week or so, and I'll be running Linux on it full-time.
I attended one of those workshops back in 2010. Their not understating the competitiveness of getting in to one, especially if you have a commercially-successful writer as one of that year's instructors. You can end up with several hundred applications, and a class size of 17-18.