If you(they) don’t mind having outdated software Debian stable might be worth looking into. Otherwise there are immutable distros which are very hard to fuck up, and even if you do there is the option to rollback to the previous version. I’d recommend Aurora or Fedora (fedora doesn’t include some proprietary stuff like some codecs so if you need that it’s probably better to use Aurora).

Linux Mint also has a version based on Debian stable, LMDE, which is could also be an option. It’s not as stable as Debian as it adds its own stuff but has the out of the box experience.

As general advice I’d suggest using less packages and more flatpaks as a faulty flatpak update can only break that flatpak, not your system. For packages be sure to disable online updates, meaning you have to reboot to apply them. This isn’t as convenient but if stability is that important to you I’d go for it

You can replace the default windows UI with an alternative shell like Open Shell (here’s a list). Not sure how reliable this works.

most of us wouldn’t want to have sex with tentacles and cat ears

As far as I’m aware Photopea is supposed to fill the same niche as GIMP or Photoshop, though I’m no expert in the field.

Have you tried Photopea? It’s browser based but very good

From their FAQ

With WinApps you do the bulk of the setup manually, and there’s no cohesive interface to bring it all together. There’s a basic TUI, a taskbar widget, and some CLI commands for you to play with.

WinBoat does all the setup once you have the pre-requisites installed, displays everything worth seeing in a neat interface for you, and acts like a complete experience. No need to mess with configuration files, no need to memorize a dozen CLI commands, it just works.

We have Wine / Proton of course and they can run a lot, but not everything is possible. WinBoat is different. Instead of running compatibility layers, it runs a real copy of Windows using Docker and KVM under the hood. The developer explains it should run basically everything unless “it requires strong GPU acceleration or kernel-level anticheat”. It uses FreeRDP for showing the apps on your Linux desktop, enabling you to interact with them like you would with any other Linux app.

I don’t want to sound rude, but maybe read the article and not just the headline before asking questions

From their FAQ

With WinApps you do the bulk of the setup manually, and there’s no cohesive interface to bring it all together. There’s a basic TUI, a taskbar widget, and some CLI commands for you to play with.

WinBoat does all the setup once you have the pre-requisites installed, displays everything worth seeing in a neat interface for you, and acts like a complete experience. No need to mess with configuration files, no need to memorize a dozen CLI commands, it just works.

The only Desktop one that comes to mind is Interstellar, but you could probably also use a web fronted that is instance independent like phtn.app (Which I would recommend if it works)

They do advertise direct export, but I’m not sure if that means encrypted json

Proton does this as well, you can use it completely offline without an account