Genuinely blown away someone would subject themselves to Kubuntu purely to avoid a package manager

Immutable distros are at the point where I’d recommend Bazzite over Mint or PopOS now, you should try it out, it’s a new paradigm for linux that matches with what you want.

As someone who threw themselves into Bazzite, it really is worth it, such a great system. If you are familiar with Docker and the dev container workflow, you really will love it on all your devices, especially laptops.