My advice is : just use Nix.

It always works. It does all the steps for you. You will never “forget a step” because either someone has already made a package, or you just make your own that has all the steps, and once that works, it works literally forever.

I’d rather have no PC than a cloud PC.

And I’m a computer scientist, so that’s saying something ! I’d sooner switch careers to lumberjack (lumberjane ? What’s the feminine ?) than have to work on that feudal nonsense.