Well, I decided to go ahead with installing Kubuntu 21.10 on the new workstation.
Boot the thumb drive, tell it to use the entire SSD, and full speed ahead.
The installation was a success, but the system wouldn't boot. I tried fiddling with partition flags, starting over with a different partition table type, and so on... no soap.
So! Do a basic install of Debian 11.2, starting from the live USB stick including the nonfree stuff. This looks like it actually brings in all the necessary drivers, so it could be what I end up settling on - yeah, back to basic vanilla Debian as usual - if Kubuntu doesn't pan out.
One little detail: instead of asking me to remove the installation medium in preparation for the post-install reboot, Debian helpfully told the BIOS to change the boot order. This was not what I wanted, and it took me a while to figure out what had happened.
That having been done, try the Kubuntu install again, but resizing the existing Linux partition down to a diminutive size and using the freed-up space. And... as earlier, Kubuntu doesn't turn up in the boot menu; just Debian. So boot Debian, run a Grub configuration manager thing (which finds Kubuntu just fine, suggesting that the installer forgot to run the Grub updater), set Kubuntu as the default, and all's well.
Or... almost all. First, I have to booth the old-kernel version of Kubuntu, then do a dist-upgrade to bring in the Nvidia driver for the updated kernel, then reboot to the current version, the old version presumably no longer working because its driver got deleted. Methinks there may be an ill-considered dependency.
It looks good, initially. But...
Google Earth crashes with some sort of library issue.
VirtualBox happily runs my Windows 10 VM (in a nice big window), but SketchUp won't run because of some OpenGL library problem - apparently the VBox-provided drivers are down-rev? (Revisiting the situation: SketchUp doesn't run, for the same reason, on the same VM on the old workstation, so I guess it never did work.)
Ah, well. I'll do some more fiddling, now that it's set up. Performance on the new-ish hardware is nice and zippy. If Kubuntu turns out to be cooperative, fine; if not, it appears that Debian 11.2 supports my hardware (graphics card and PCIe WiFi card), so that's a generally-safe option whereto I might return.
... Gotta come up with a list of must-install software. Including seeing if the last Linux version of Acrobat Reader will install, 'cause the open-source PDF readers haven't (last I checked) caught up on stuff like having zillions of documents open in tabs, and all the tabs being in one master PDF-viewer window, which is kind of important for my purposes. Be nice if one did catch up on that feature, especially if it turned out less buggy than ol' Acrobelfry.
Update: Acrobelfry installs but doesn't appear to be working. (I haven't tried installing the Windows version using WINE; might be worth a try.) But! Contrary to the project's previously-announced intentions, it appears that qpdfview now handles tabs exactly the way I want. So I'll likely be using that'n for most of my PDF reading, and, if one program or another handles things like filling out the current version of forms, maybe I can do away with the Adobe product altogether, or just use the Windows version in a VM when it's absolutely needed.
Update 2: The problem with Google Dirt? Has been a thing, on and off, at least since 2014. Exactly the same error message. Something to do with the bundled libraries being buggy. I downloaded the installer for the previous version of Dirt, installed that, and now it runs fine (and apt upgrade doesn't replace it with a non-working version).
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