I’d highly recommend Talos for this if you haven’t already decided. It’s entirely API driven and immutable. It can be bootstrapped from PXE and truly feels like a local cloud environment.

If you’re looking for outgoing requests, check out OpenSnitch. It should do exactly what you’re looking for.

Steam is natively installed and works perfectly. You can install other packages, but it effectively adds another layer which slows down updates a bit.

Preface: I don’t have any experience with Garuda or Nobara but I have used Bazzite.

Not to make the choice harder, but Bazzite does come with Plasma 6. You can have it boot to the SteamOS UI or to the Plasma Desktop.

Bazzite is a great choice for stability but you need to be aware it doesn’t operate like a traditional Linux distribution since it’s based on ostree and is immutable. Package installations are primarily done through Flatpak, AppImage or exported via Distrobox.

It was right there.

Always has bean

For me it was

— I’d seen weirder things in Perl scripts —

Just perfect. No notes.

Have you looked at the Starlite? It’s more expensive than an android tablet but might do what you’re looking for.

Heard about this the other day. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks promising.

To be fair, arch could look like that after a few days.

If you like the idea of asdf, I would recommend looking at mise. It does all the same things (and more) and is much more performant in my experience.

The guided installer will resize your disk volume and set it up for dual boot by default. It’s Fedora based and uses KDE Plasma which is a great user experience IMO. Admittedly, I only booted into it to briefly kick the tires but the install was a pretty smooth process. This page details what features are still missing so I’d suggest looking there first to ensure you’re not missing anything critical. For me, missing USB-C monitor support is a deal breaker.