Personally go: Flatpak (I like easily controlling an apps premissions) -> flatpak version is broken... Try system package -> distrobox -> compiling -> appimage -> not installing a package
Distrobox/containerd is so nice since a lot of the niche tools I use require Debian or Ubuntu dependency versions, but I'd be lying if I said everything "just works"
For me at least it is 100% a hobby. Sure when I'm actually working I'm either running plasma or riverwm basically stock, but it's genuinly really fun to see how "hollywood hacker" based I can get my desktop to look. It also helps me learn more about interacting with the inner workings of linux since I like to modify things myself instead of using other peoples dots. I even made a shitty terminal application launcher using pure fish cause I wanted to see if I could, and it taught me a ton about .desktop files and binary locations and flags. That information I now use daily building my own applications