I think we should be chasing all the trendy trends to become competitive with the competition. That's the only way to push those numbers up (that need to be pushed up). That's how a winner wins.
This is the answer. Current stable Debian already has the latest release of Xfce (4.18); and for recent gui apps there's flatpak.
For packages like syncthing you can enable official apt repos to get the latest versions.
Other packages for which the latest versions are desirable though the flatpak versions get a bit too finicky (like vim & emacs), you can compile from source. It's not hard, even for a newbie.
Right; a stationary Steam Machine (upgradable, etc.) would be a desktop PC running SteamOS, which should probably remain outside the purview of Valve's hardware division.
'Mastering Emacs' is a very highly regarded resource; & it might be the only one that fits your requirements -- it's laid out as a book that you can read from cover to cover: https://www.masteringemacs.org/
Needles to say, though, that for the concepts discussed in the book to sink in, reading alone wouldn't suffice.
It was going perfectly smooth (Plasma 6 wayland, amdgpu drivers); though the past week or so I started getting random shell crashes. (It's very impressive that Qt apps all come back unscathed -- but I don't use too many Qt apps.)
Even before that (by about 2 years, I believe), when ZFS on Linux became OpenZFS as the shared upstream, that constituted the proverbial 'writing on the wall'.
What's "Mordor Intelligence" -- is that a real thing, or a parody of the surveillance/'defense' industry companies that are coming up with names nicked from LotR? ('Anduril', 'Palantir')
I think we should be chasing all the trendy trends to become competitive with the competition. That's the only way to push those numbers up (that need to be pushed up). That's how a winner wins.