What you’re talking about is basically an encrypted backup. Seedvault does exactly that, it’s included in many custom ROMs, including GrapheneOS.

Well, I’m sorry. I’m not Terry A. Davis.

Soooo, which distro to switch to next? Or are they all gonna go down this route eventually? Maybe I’ll try a *BSD for once.

Have you tried screen? AFAIK it’s similar to tmux, but tmux has more bells and whistles, which it sounds like you want to avoid. I use it sometimes to start long running rsync sessions on a server and then periodically SSH in and check it. It does break scrolling though, but I don’t know if there’s some option to make it behave more like a normal terminal.

Bazzite is the more gaming oriented flavour of Universal Blue’s distros, but take a look at Bluefin if you wanna try something similar (but not focused on gaming, although gaming also works fine on it). I’ve used it for about a year or so myself, and I love it. It’s immutable so it “just works”, but I can still play around and tinker with distroboxes or VMs.