I’d highly recommend Talos for this if you haven’t already decided. It’s entirely API driven and immutable. It can be bootstrapped from PXE and truly feels like a local cloud environment.

Not quite a tablet but if you’d consider a convertible, the Framework 12 is a solid choice.

If you’re looking for outgoing requests, check out OpenSnitch. It should do exactly what you’re looking for.

Steam is natively installed and works perfectly. You can install other packages, but it effectively adds another layer which slows down updates a bit.

Preface: I don’t have any experience with Garuda or Nobara but I have used Bazzite.

Not to make the choice harder, but Bazzite does come with Plasma 6. You can have it boot to the SteamOS UI or to the Plasma Desktop.

Bazzite is a great choice for stability but you need to be aware it doesn’t operate like a traditional Linux distribution since it’s based on ostree and is immutable. Package installations are primarily done through Flatpak, AppImage or exported via Distrobox.

It was right there.

Always has bean

For me it was

— I’d seen weirder things in Perl scripts —

Just perfect. No notes.

You can use two separate VPNs if you use a work profile to run the second one. I’m not sure if this would work for your use case though. Check out Shelter if you want to give it a try.