TheSecondPower :
I would've seriously considered buying an Optane drive. It's expensive for the capacity, yes, but for under $100 I could've had more than enough capacity for a Linux install and run it on the fastest SSD available. But none of that matters, because I have a computer with a Ryzen processor, and Intel's Optane drives only work with specific Intel processors.
You're a victim of Intel's failed marketing. You definitely can use an Optane drive on Ryzen. It works just like any other NVMe SSD. And even though Intel allows you to use it as an Optane cache on their Coffee Lake and Kaby Lake motherboards, there's no reason you can't use it with AMD's StoreMI software to accomplish a similar tiered storage solution on Ryzen.
So you could have definitely gotten an Optane drive and installed Linux on it. Maybe Intel just didn't make that clear enough.