I use Silverblue and in general I like their philosophy. For other distros, it can be summed up as:

• Flatpaks for GUI applications
• Your choice of package manager for everything else

On Silverblue anything non-Flatpak is best installed inside a container. On a non-atomic distro I’d just install using the system’s default package manager.

Great post - I agree, Linux Mint or Ubuntu sound appropriate for OP. Solid systems with a lot of support.