I knew a tvtropes link was going to be here as soon as I saw the question lol, here goes my next three hours I guess

Lol my workplace ships Angular in debug mode. Don't worry though, the whole page kills itself if a dubious third-party library detects the console is open. Very secure and not brittle at all! ~~Please send help~~

I know it's arguably part of why it's intimidating to your average newcomer but I adore that it's mostly nerdy techies lol. I'm so used to dropping something vaguely technical and being met with the online equivalent of blank stares so people being willing and able to engage with that sort of thing is super nice!

That's great first issue to solve, I love the way it fits!

Responsiveness for typical everyday usage is one of the main scenarios kernels like Zen/Liquorix and their out of the box scheduler configurations are meant to improve, and in my experience they help a lot. Maybe give them a go sometime!

Edit: For added context, I remember Zen significantly improving responsiveness under heavy loads such as the one OP is experiencing back when I was experimenting with some particularly computationally intensive tasks

No such thing, we all start somewhere! :)

Anyway, you could in fact do that if you were thinking of trying out other Fedora Atomic images such as Silverblue and whatnot (see also the ublue page listing tons of others, including your bazzite!). This uses different tooling, so unfortunately not in this case.

I wouldn't say unusable but NVIDIA definitely makes things way more painful than they ought to be with their closed source drivers and general stubbornness to support newer technologies under Linux, see Wayland. Mint's generally older packages also might be working against you.

In my experience, I've had the smoothest experiences with gaming focused/adjacent distros which just include the NVIDIA drivers out of the box, such as Nobara or Bazzite. Those just work for the most part with no user intervention, and you don't even have to think about it.

I'll second Rust, it's so fresh and versatile! You can go from super low level stuff all the way to things like web frameworks with WebAssembly and whatnot.

The memory model is definitely a unique beast but I've found it gave me some insight on how it all actually works behind the scenes and I appreciate the strictly enforced correctness too.

My understanding as a NixOS user is a lot of its fundamentals are very strongly coupled to systemd. It's responsible for things like running system activation scripts and managing any services it exposes options to, so replacing it sounds like a tall order.

I'm not aware of any Nix-based alternatives, but I'd definitely welcome them! Oh and also, as others have pointed out, Guix might fit the bill depending on your needs.

Yeah I've gotten into Nix recently and it's slowly been taking everything over bit by bit. So now I have the standalone package manager when I'm on WSL or other distros, full NixOS on a couple machines, fully reproducible LXC containers for my Proxmox build, the list goes on and on! Hell, I've got it on my steam deck to manage my CLI apps just because I can lol

Ah, my bad. I'm so used to it all that I can't help but spit out jargon with no context sometimes 😅

I'm referring to apps like Sonarr, which basically keeps an eye on torrent/usenet providers and downloads episodes for you automatically. So you tell it you want some show, optionally set the quality you want it at, and it takes care of everything so that the episodes just show up on Jellyfin/Plex after they air and it grabs them. There's also Radarr for movies and a whole bunch of related ones.

As someone from a developing country, I'm painfully aware of how most big publishers choose to ignore recommended prices and just go with a straight USD conversion most of the time so I can only hope this doesn't screw them even further.

I really wish it was viable for Valve to enforce a ceiling on suggested prices or something along those lines, it's about the only way I see that ever changing. Well, that, or everyone just becoming a full-time sailor, I suppose!