Lmao this is amazing. The future is now…

The openSUSE matrix server had this happen last year, and the admins came up with a good solution of bots that seems to keep things very clean now. I’m sure they might be happy to help if you asked in their admins group

If you set up the system like openSUSE then it makes sense snapper would work. I’d look at the openSUSE docs, its not like btrfs is different in Gentoo right? https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:BTRFS#Default_Subvolumes

The GUI version was working a month or so ago, but a recent Tumbleweed update broke openVPN when using port forwarding via natpmpc. Bug report here https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1236718

Wireguard on the Proton GUI client on Linux is experimental, don’t use it except for testing. Use the manual setup, and make sure to test for DNS leaks.

With Linux, you can literally do anything that you want. And lots of people are already doing just what you describe, making pretty and functional Desktop Environments and compositors for anyone to use. As a beginner I’d encourage you to check out all the major Desktop Environment options first. You can usually get any of these in most major distros (Cosmic may be less available and mature right now).

https://www.gnome.org/

https://kde.org/

https://system76.com/cosmic/

Article with others https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/best-linux-desktop-environments/

Then you can get into compositors, plugins, and other customization, where you can make your system look almost exactly how you want it:

https://hyprland.org/

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/6099/paperwm/

https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth

https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri

These just happen to include tiling because I love tiling haha… I’m sure there are other non-tiling projects you could try out as well.

Edit: sounds like you may have already rejected a bunch of the status quo Desktop Environments as too boring haha. Then I would encourage you to check out Cosmic, and then the experimental tiling compositors I listed above… I’m sure you will find them unique at the very least!

This is hilarious… after bailing from using the run file a couple months ago and going back to the 550 driver due to instability, I finally decided to install the 570 manually today. Should have waited LOL, the timing…