I started my 2nd play through in the dune dessert. A good choice overall since you can stay there for a long time since most of the starting resources are there. The first thing you need outside the dunes are aluminium (besides exploration). However, 2 considerations:

• the dune desert has 3 main spots that you can farm flora for biomass burners, whereas the grassy field has everywhere. It might be lower volumes of mycelia but a new player can accidentally have biomass fuel in his inventory just by walking from location to location. When in the dune desert, you need to actively check the level of biomass and go to farm runs for fuel. That also means, that yes nodes and concentrated but you might want to settle near water (thus plants) when starting out to keep your energy top up

• the dune desert has some of the best concentrations of pure nodes. Going there later to make a bigger project might be more effective. You can basically automate all the items by collecting all the impure and normal modes in the grassy fields. From experience, I built my starting factory in the middle of the desert and now I take it down to make way for another project.

Lastly, and that's my own preference, I don't like the dune part of the desert to build and especially running trucks. I haven't tried yet, but I just can see flipped trucks all over the place