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.
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')
macOS switched from AFS to samba for file sharing & time machine backups a while ago; it's been a while since I had first-hand experience setting up a Mac, but based on that fact I'm pretty sure samba is more straightforward to use.
... it annoyingly mangles unix file ownership, & permissions though, as mentioned above in https://lemmy.ml/comment/10204431
doas is likewise configurable; though the mechanism that keeps track of the timeout is different on OpenBSD (where doas originated) & Linux ---- and there used to be some reservations about the latter implementation.
There's a linux port for the SGI file browser featured in the movie: https://fsv.sourceforge.net/ ---- haven't run it in ages, though; I don't know if it's still functional.
One for each deadly sin, duh.