Fortunately, AMD upstreams its changes so no custom distro is required for Strix Halo boxes. The DGX is the platform more at risk of being left behind on Linux - just like Jetson before it, which also had a custom, now-abandoned distro.

This right here, Jetson is abandoned - while Strix Halo is x86 and will run new Linux distributions for years (decades?)

Does NVIDIA really not have a defined support lifetime/cycle?

You may remember this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ

Needing a customized spin of Ubuntu to have working video drivers is an Nvidia thing. One can also choose a Windows option, if they like, and run AI from there as it's just a standard x86 PC. That might actually be the best option for those worried about pre-installed OSs for AI tinkering.

The userspace side is where AI is difficult with AMD. Almost all of the community is build around Nvidia tooling first, others second (if it all).

i cannot state how much i despise this 'old ubuntu needed' state of affairs with the ai stuff

Amd works with recent kernels oob. DGX runs on custom Ubuntu with a year old kernel

It is not what the Romc experience tells.

Does Romc=ROCm, or something else? If the former, ROCm is just a userspace compute library for the in-kernel amdgpu driver. The "kernels" it runs are GPU compute programs, not customized Linux kernels.