I’ve several Debian stable servers operating in my stack. Almost all of them host a range of VMs in addition to a plethora of containers. Some house large arrays, others focus on application gruntwork. I chose Debian because I know it, been using it since the early 00s. It’s👌.

Hard to know. Will the interface be specific to driver versions? Will it require an updated kernel driver for each userspace driver as it does now? I don’t know that we have the answers.

Worth noting that Nvidia only intends to open source the kernel driver. This is only half the driver, as a userspace blob will still be required, and that will remain closed and proprietary.

I’d start with checking logs with journalctl as a privileged user. If the device disappears, there should be logs about it. Maybe that will point the way.