The checking media message is your bios trying to boot from some external network drive. I had that issue for the longest, and I realized that I misunderstood how the boot order actually worked.
Try swapping your boot order around to opposite how it is currently? That's what I did and it solved my problem
The hatred has nothing to do with the products but the lack of participation in open standards like OpenGL or Vulkan.
Their products are incredibly well made (though I'd fuckin hope so given the pricing) and their software experience (barring the lack of good graphics API support) is quite nice.
The hatred literally stems purely from Windows 10 and 11.
They are products engineered so expertly to frustrate you in such a distasteful way it's downright offensive to anyone who has used any other operating system. It's genuinely a marvel of human engineering.
It's really no better on NVIDIA, in fact its much worse since async reprojection likes to break more often on NVIDIA for some reason, VR in general on Linux is atrocious.
Well... there's an argument to be made there.