If you want to gradually move away from closed and/or paid software, afaik, the only way is through unlocking the bootloader and uninstalling programs through there.

Alternatively, there is the nuclear option, to replace the whole system, and start from zero with a distro as close as possible from AOSP. Worth noting it also requires unlocking the bootloader.

Whether it’s a rage-click community, a community made for an agenda, or both, I don’t know, but in either cases, I wouldn’t see as surprising for the mods in such a community to be very trigger-happy. Best you can do, I think, is to block communities and individuals with such a profile, and to recommend others to not engaging (remember to explain why if you do it, btw).

Mint seems decent all around. No cutting edges nor it’s specialized in any areas, but it’s a jack of all trades, and rather stable.

On the joke, define “sane”. 😬

On a serious note, I think there are valid reasons to have several VMs other than “I was bored”. In my case, for example, I have a total of 7 VMs, where 2 are miscellaneous systems to test things out, 2 are for stuff that I can’t normally run on Linux, 2 are offline VMs for language dictionaries, and 1 is a BlissOS VM with Google programs in case I can’t/don’t want to use my phone.

To my knowledge, besides the newest updates not necessarily being as stable, but also, other softwares that interact with it would need time to adapt themselves to be sure they’re as compatible as they were before. In a situation of constant updates, other software would always be on a situation of catching up, whereas updates that take a bit longer to land allow “for the dust to set down”.

About gaming, from my personal experience, it’s overall pretty straight forward. When issues happen, you just got to have patience to read through logs and search up on Google or similar any suspicious parts of the log. Worst part is usually DRM/anticheat, but from what I can gather, usually pretty isolated cases are problematic due to compatibility, usually requiring the devs to go out of their ways to make the DRM incompatible.

As for the distros question, perhaps Linux Mint? It trades off bleeding edge updates for the sake of stability. Just avoid the Debian-based variant of Mint for now as it’s still in beta.

Both tools can be used from the terminal like most Linux programs, which should also give you better control during troubleshooting and setting up some more temperamental games. There are also graphical programs that handle Wine/Proton in a more friendly way, such as Heroic Launcher, Lutris and, specifically for Proton, Steam itself.

There are cases where AppImages aren’t viable indeed, like with programs that require ring 0 access. But limitations exist for all formats, so perhaps another good alternative is having multiple versions of a given program, like downloading the equivalent deb package through apt while also keeping the appimage version. It would bloat the storage for a potential automated configuration, but it should help with ensuring compatibility.

One thing I like to have with me is the AppImage version of programs when possible, since they usually work out of the box. Also helps ensuring I don’t depend on the availability of whatever package manager the system uses.

Never saw it before, but going by its description now, it’s the “GNU version of the Firefox browser”, so I would presume you can import everything you could between two Firefox installations, like whole profiles and favorites back up file.