In general the Steam Deck is not the kind of device that is going to run things at max settings. You are gonna play at 720p30FPS low settings but be happy you can play at all on a train or airplane. It’s really meant to be a competitor to the Nintendo Switch than a replacement for a gaming PC.

You can stream from your PC to your couch or bed if you are at home.

/home is for every program to store its personal junk in hidden files apaprently

Xubuntu is more than fine. Tbh it doesn’t hugely matter which distro you use for this type of thing

Honestly if you buy a Mac give macOS a try. It’s Unix based so you’ll feel at home in the command line. It doesn’t come with a command line package manager but there are two popular ones you can install (homebrew and macports).

Unfortunately it really doesn’t. And it’s actually Linux that’s the bigger problem: whenever it decides to updates GRUB it looks for OSes on all of your drives to make grub entries for them. It also doesn’t necessarily modify the version of grub on the booted drive.

Yes I’m sure there’s a way to manually configure everything perfectly but my goal is a setup where I don’t have to constantly manually fix things.

My experience was that the school provided free Windows keys for a personal computer if you needed one (they didn’t provide the computer itself) but the majority of computers I interacted with on campus (mostly in the computer lab) were Linux (some Debian variant iirc). I think the printing computers in the library were windows. I took an art class at one point and they had Macs (it was for using the Apple’s Final Cut Pro).

We never used LibreOffice though. Everyone just uses Google Drive.

What I want in $HOME are the following directories:

If I’m on a GUI-based environment:

• Desktop
• Documents
• Downloads

In general:

• .local
• my_junk_folder_i_made

I’d like everything else to live within something like ~/.local thanks

The noveau drivers don’t work with Nvidia cards on x11 either.

Honestly, if it’s just a small, personal project, just use common sense and take some basic precautions (e.g. use a firewall, use NGINX instead of serving Wordpress directly, etc.).

Note that CloudFlare doesn’t protect you from everything either - it only provides some very specific services. A rudimentary level of caching images being the most common one a free account level would be able to use.