It was never so much about the hate for GOS as it was for Daniel. Daniel is a absolute genius but has some mental and paranoid issues. Which hurt GOS reputation in the proces, Dont get me wrong I do not hate the guy or GOS at all but I do agree Daniel has some serious issues.
I ise about the same. But that is more due to the hardware I got being a bit older. 2 dell R710s 1 R510 and a custom build server. Everything is still 1g. In my case electricity is not a big deal due to solar. We produce much more then we can use our self.
Steam has mostly fixed the “service” issue compared to something like streaming services. One place to get almost any and all games. One account to access it all. Very simple for the end user. And does a load for the community as well. Take a look at proton for a example.
Most likely you could have restored it by installing the launcher back with adb or worst case reset the device. That will bring back all apps as well. Unless you have a rooted phone and removed the apps that way.
As someone who daily drives Opensuse TW and have used arch, gentoo etc. I would highly recommend mint for a new user most of the time. It is one of the distros that works out of the box without any tinkering. Want to add a printer on opensue using yast? good luck. in mint it is a few clicks. just to name a example