experienced this with BG3 on gog while my friends had the steam version, when it launched. Patches on gog were delayed by sometime a week, preventing us to play together.

I have debian stable with xfce on a 2014 laptop. Increasing the fonts size and using KDE connect for remote on the phone to control the whole thing. Works smoothly for video and internet, just what I need.

It’s tedious when you need to run terminal commands so I have an SSH server running there too.

For gaming maybe you want to consider moonlight utility, to stream steam games from your gaming PC to your TV PC. It’s decent for most games but forget competitive shooters.

I like to use https://searx.neocities.org/ It randomises your search across several searx instances. It’s not always reliable as some instances are sometimes down or exceed request limit. But retrying often works. Worst case i use mojeek or ddg