+1 for proton, though I think modern VM tech very little overhead these days.

Not directly answering your question but legally I think you’re better off claiming to impersonate a famous person than to have the AI claim to be them.

Occasionally some manufacturers use some weird proprietary connection but usually both DVD drives and 3.5" disks use the same SATA connectors. Heck, even in the old IDE/PATA days you could use the same connection on either.

So yeah, the connection is the same and probably will plug and play without any configuration needed

I’ve heard that immich and other picture-organizing software can will something like this?

Off the top of my head I cannot remember the specifics, but there are several options during boot that you can make optional, for instance don’t wait until there’s an internet connection.

I don’t have my glasses on right now but just reading the title, sounds like you might want this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download