~/Scripts for any bash or python scripts
~/Gits for any repos I clone
~/Projects for any projects im working on (not organized by programming language, but I do have some dirs called zig, go, etc., for when im learning a new language and want to make some projects for learning purposes)

Most other files go into ~/Documents if they don’t have a home already, or don’t fit into the above directories

Performance will likely be really bad running on a live ISO since you are going to likely be bottlenecked by read/write speeds of the usb you have plugged in. I wouldn’t use it to test performance of games.

I had a dual gpu Dell Xps laptop a couple of years ago, and the best experience I had with it was PopOS. It was the only distro that worked with that laptop out of the box without just completely disabling the dgpu.