I'm pretty sure you can also advance with Bazzite. I haven't done anything too advanced, but I can imagine one can learn a lot simply by learning the ujust commands as they would apt.
I suggest BazziteOS. I have it installed on 2 of my computers for about a year and it works great. It runs KDE and it looks similar to Windows but is much better. Also, I believe it has support for Wallpaper Engine, though I haven't tried it.
It is Fedora based and Fedora also has a sizeable community for any questions and tutorials you may have.
The reason why I recommend Bazziteos is because it comes out of the box ready for gaming, you would have steam, wine, lutris, etc installed almost instantly and ready to play.
I use duolingo every day and it's alright for vocabulary. It actually recently had some voice exercises to practice everyday conversation and it has been great as well.
It's not like American scientists and intellectuals will flee to other nations that value themselves more, crippling US innovation...right?