> Discrete GPU with desired ports?

It's not a question of desired ports, simply a preference to not get extra wires/adapters.

(Also, anything without noisy fans is liable to be a downgrade from the built-in Radeon.)

> Does the board not ship with drivers?

Many manufacturer's attitude to Linux-based OSes hasn't really changed in the past two decades, but even ignoring that aspect, the only universal media these days is USB drives.

(Heh, which makes me realise I'm going to want an SD reader for this machine.)

Thus, only Windows drivers are available for download, though at least the Gigabyte driver section does acknowledge its existence with: "Due to different Linux support condition provided by chipset vendors, please download Linux driver from chipset vendors' website or 3rd party website."

But yeah, it's basically down to when drivers are submitted to the kernel - anything too new might not have made it into an LTS release yet.