@gravitywell
@sh.itjust.worksUsing a live usb is the correct answer since compiling a custom initramfs would require one anyway and just add more steps... Not sure what gives you the impression using a liveusb is "more complicated" but its not.
Mail carriers are not idiots, they just discard the thing as trash since its obviously not an envelope... Business reply mail will only ever be paper letters, so what you actually want to do is just send whatever it is back to them with useless information or if its an actual envelope you can stuff it with glitter or shred the paper inside, its still technically "improper use" but they won't know that until its at the destination.
Keep trying, check protondb for the games you want to play, popos is probably the best, or garuda has support for nvidia out of the box
If nothing else just try back once or twice a year whenever you see a new release from the distro you want to use. The 1660 is a pretty common card so in general it should be well supported.
This is a tough situation because the more changes to settings you make the more unique you will appear. Less is more in this case, libre wolf or Mullvad are both good Firefox based browsers with good defaults. My biggest recommendation to add is a cookie auto delete plugin, or if you dont need to keep anything logged in even better just have it delete cookies on shutdown.
Can you upgrade the desktop? What speed is your laptops WiFi?
I just use rsync manually until I have syncthig working but these don't really solve slowdown issues and aren't mounted. I would look into a better NIC and/or storage for the desktop or possibly your router.
Try using something like iperf to measure raw speed of the connection between your 2 systems, see if its what it should be (around 300-600mbps for wireless to wired locally) and try to narrow down where the bottleneck is.