Same as the past 10 or so years, from what I can tell.

First, I'd suggest flashing a community system ROM. OEM systems are both very bloated, and stop being supported much earlier than community ones, so they're not ideal unless you need to use it with some banking app or the sort. And if you don't need Google's services (de-Google, anyone?), I strongly recommend going for a vanilla system instead of a Gapps one.

Now, as stated in MargotRobbie's comment, one good use is as a media player. If you can sideload stuff like VLC and Librera Reader, you should be covered.

You can also use it for some lighter gaming, if that's your thing, as there's plenty of emulators, wrappers and engine implementations for Android.

You can also use it for running servers, if you do this sort of stuff.

And if you like to test around with softwares, a spare Android device is pretty good to have.

Previous 12 months:

June 2023: -0.03%
May 2023: +0.15%
April 2023: +0.48%
March 2023: -0.43%
February 2023: -0.11%
January 2023: no difference
December 2023: -0.06%
November 2022: +0.16%
October 2022: +0.05%
September 2022: -0.04%
August 2022: +0.04%
July 2022: +0.05%

It would seem Linux among Steam users shows a growth tendency.
Hopefully this tendency keeps going strong!

The majority of posts on Reddit are also like that. Perhaps a curse of a feed-oriented forum (or whatever this type of social media is called)

Grid-based, dungeon crawler RPG (a mouthful, I know). The most recent titles in this genre I remember are the Mary Skelter trilogy, but the first game is about 10 years old already.

If you absolutely must get something from Google Play, I suggest Aurora Store, which acts as an alternative frontend for Google Play, so you don't have to have GApps installed.

If you have use for command line programs, Termux, a terminal emulator, is a great option, and it also works with root.

For reading eBooks, I also have a recommendation, Librera Reader (but I'll check the OP's recommendation too).

Material Files and Simple File Manager are great file browsing tools. But if you need a file browser for root specifically, I recommend Material Files specifically.

De-google, anyone?

There's an extension made by Mozilla themselves, Multi-Account Containers, which could be useful for your needs:
https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers

I guess you could say it works as a "profile-lite" feature.

I'd recommend Mint, because, from my experience, it's pretty stable, UX is designed so terminal usage can be kept to a minimum (but you can still prioritize it if you want), support from programs is overall good, and it ditches snap. But worth noting that, if you need cutting edge features, Mint is not for you, as it seems to be the new Debian, where updates are traded off for stability.

Given I avoid the Play Store as much as possible (don't like it; it's just a killswitch/rental service, at the end of the day), I sought readers distributed as APKs, and the best one I found (which is also FOSS) is Librera Reader, which also has pre-built APKs on F-Droid and Github:

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.foobnix.pro.pdf.reader/

https://github.com/foobnix/LibreraReader/releases/latest

DRM is not a protection. It is a killswitch. Even MMOs can theoretically be DRM-free. So this situation just lays the DRM issue bare. points to GOG, Itchio, ZP, and so on

I'd suggest changing the link permission to "anyone can comment" instead, as any ill-intended individual can grief the file as it is now. Then those who moderate the file can approve or deny new entries.