My oldest did have to take a personal finance class in high school (last year) and did cover things like retirement saving and different methods of. I think some places are trying.
Yeah, basically your DE will be the default of the distro. I've never had good luck with KDE above Centos 7. But I'm good with Gnome. I'm not saying it's not possible, but it's not worth my time and effort personally.
I used Rocky 9 at home for a while. I think I had an emergency with a disk and had to install fedora because it's all I had. I also use Rocky 8 workstations at work without any problem.
I could easily slip back to Rocky over Fedora no problem. But I don't game or do anything except serve ipa.
Edit: and yes these were/are my daily driver desktops.
some partitions are useful.
Keeping /var and /tmp separate can stop DoS attacks by now allowing logs to fill the entire drive
/home means you can wipe the / partition and keep user data.
Wine/bottles? I do use qobuz in a bottle and get hd audio out to my dac.