I’m setting up something similar using Unraid and VMs. This route would probably be more of a challenge for you technically… But if you’re willing to learn, and pay, Unraid sounds like it would be a good fit for what you’re trying to accomplish.

I always thought kernel devs were smart people. I’m kind of shocked learning a new language is this big of a barrier to them.

That’s a good point. I should have said “indistinguishable after some tinkering”. You raise a valid complaint, though it’s not a deal breaker for me.

Why is it a bad way to handle things?

I have an alias set up and SDKs enabled. The experience is indistinguishable from a regular install. But you could also layer it onto the os image or install it in user space if you don’t like flatpaks for the extra resource usage or something. That’s a complete non issue for me though.

I do my main development with Bazzite. I use the Neovim flatpak for my editor and toolbox for builds and such.

Playnite

Ignoring lint issues comes to mind as an at least somewhat reasonable use case.

Wanted to see if I could do anything exciting with the new Satisfactory dedicated server API. There’s no documentation of it anywhere online, but there’s a random markdown file documenting it in the installation directory. Got it working but turns out it can’t do much. Oh well

I wouldn’t recommend talking to your cat about Satanism. The best bet is to just hope they never find out about it.

Open source alternative to Adobe Lightroom

Same reason most non technical people using Linux today do so on the Steam Deck. If you want to spread Linux, trying to convince individuals is going about it all wrong.

You need to convince Canonical or Red Hat to spend more on partnerships with manufacturers. I’m not sure if anyone else has deep enough pockets.