I am not going to troubleshoot this via Lemmy, but it does sound interesting. The fact that you specifically mention the combination of your GPU plus the 128GB of RAM still suggests to me that it's a hardware or driver issue.
Windows has supported 128GB of RAM since Windows XP x64 Edition.
Well, at least for me...
Yeah, I do like me some file extensions.
I want a GUI for some things, but I'm perfectly comfortable with SSH into a machine as well. My general purpose server has a DE on it. My second server has a specific use and has no DE, nor do my IOT devices. All of them are headless.
I have an older laptop with Arch (btw) on it. It runs well for what I use it for. I understand I'm not watching YouTube in 4K though. The CPU and GPU have their limits.