Kory
Maybe TUXEDO OS is something you want to consider. From the description of Distrowatch: “The distribution uses KDE Plasma as the preferred desktop (…) removal of Ubuntu’s snap daemon and snap packages…” The first review mentions that “You can even switch between X11 and Wayland at the log-in screen” and Distrowatch also lists all the packages so you can compare if they are newer than Debian’s.
I haven’t tried it myself yet, but I’ve read some good reviews - might be worth a try. Let us know, what you settled with, please!
In Mint most people recommend installing Steam directly from the website as .deb. There are dozens of informative threads on the official forums, which also explain some differences of the installation method, for example: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=427582
Also Valve’s guide on how to use Steam with an NTFS disk (which I assume you’re using) can be found here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-disk-with-Linux-and-Windows
Thank you so much for introducing me to Liz Climo, I love her work and keep sending it to friends since I’ve found it.
Maybe you can also find open source communities in your area. After some digging, I was surprised how many groups there are in my area and they are always happy to get additional hands to organize stuff or run errands etc.
Sure it’s allowed, but we have these questions a lot, so some enthusiasts made some really great posts with tons of info, for example:
https://lemmy.ml/post/12123645
https://lemmy.ml/post/18268622
I’d recommend to read through them, then come back and ask more specific questions.