Related to OP’s question: is it possible to have the 1B boot from something other than an SD card?
I ran it as a PiHole for awhile, until it chewed through two SD cards. I’d like to use it for the GPIO functionality but I don’t want have it randomly crap out again.
When he first started he used Pop!_OS and an issue with their packages uninstalled the DE when he tried to install steam which was a really terrible look. A bug which I believe wasn’t present in any other debian/ubuntu based distro. He then moved to Manjaro, an Arch-based distro, and just had more problems with hardware.
I wish they’d try again and just use a user-friendly distro with more momentum behind it and stability, and realistically that means Ubuntu or Mint. Or take a tour through desktop environments, package managers, and what the differences between distros actually are.