One thing about the thumbdrives, a LOT of features did not work for me when running live bootable, and it almost put me off. Then I made the actuall full install and a lot of the stuff that had not worked now did. Just so people understand the live bootables are very much just a demo, and doesn’t say much about compatibility really.
I’m running XFCE (but you could do KDE) on my intel Mac, you can get best of both worlds. I heard silicon is more difficult with Linux tho.