If you run into programs that need a kernel module or superuser permissions, just distro hop.

The rest of your post is fantastic, and I appreciate a good distro hop… However I gotta say that with bazzite, using dev-env to build quick boxes to get work done and user space for layering configuration and other tweaks has been a much better user experience for me. I have been using Linux distro since 2004 and every time I sudo installed something it inevitably would lead to some weird lib or system level configuration change that wasn’t easy or obvious to fix. With bazzite I’ve been able to write drivers for my flight sim setup without having to use root once.

Tldr: bazzite/immutable for the win