Best advice I can give, is every time you have to stop and solve some problem, make a .txt/.md file with your solution/links, and name the file with a bunch of keywords that let you use fsearch to look it up when you eventually need to solve that problem again. Future you will thank you.

Here’s some projects you may find useful

For playing around with dev projects, “Distrobox” is an easy way to manage mostly isolated environments, to keep your main system clean: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

I use Nobara as my Desktop OS, which is a fedora/KDE based distribution by GloriousEggroll that’s a desktop first and foremost (unlike a console UI oriented distro like Bazzite). It includes a bunch of nice things and cutting edge (https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom) stuff out of the box so there’s less for me to set up with. Steam, and the few games I play on it just work like normal.

For games from places Like GOG, Lutris works far more often than not. If I recall correctly, it’s literally just a matter of running the .exe

Most of my other programs are installed as flatpacks, which I would recommend.

Note that Nobara is not currently an immutable distro (like Bazzite). Like windows, you’ll likely want to reinstall it in a few years (or after some failed project) to start “fresh”.

For my NAS boxes, I use Proxmox, which I guess is mostly Debian with a Ubuntu kernel and select packages kept more up to date and a built in web UI. Proxmox is nice because its kernel (even the opt in newer kernels that can be offered on the forums) is kept in sync with ZFS which I use for my archives. I disable High Availability, among other things. Useful links:

https://free-pmx.org/guides/

https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/

Biggest gotcha with proxmox is if it seems to have lost internet access (like the webUI suddenly not working), your network device got changed/renamed due to a kernel update. You’ll need physical/KVM access to update the entry in /etc/network/interfaces with the new active network device name. Also if you install on a ZFS root, proxmox uses system-boot and silently ignores classic grub settings.