Are you going fangless?

I would definitely go fangless. I have been bitten enough times. A bite might also transfer viruses. Nowadays I defang all my computers.

But then why bother to package the game for the distro in the first place?

Sorry, but you are mistaken. Joplin definitely encrypts data at rest if you enable end-to-end encryption: https://joplinapp.org/e2ee/

• Plex and Jellyfin for movies and TV shows. I want to switch from Plex to Jellyfin but it is not quite there yet. It‘s very little effort to keep Jellyfin running in parallel though. I am keeping it around to regularly compare the two and re-evaluate.
• Tube Archivist for archiving and watching YouTube videos.
• Miniflux for reading feeds.
• Nextcloud, mainly for calendars and contacts; occasionally for sharing files with others.
• Syncthing for syncing files.
• Financier for budgeting.
• Paperless-ngx for managing documents.
• Qbittorrent for downloading and sharing Linux ISOs.
• Prowlarr for searching Linux ISOs.
• Copyparty for sharing Linux ISOs with friends.
• Shaarli for saving bookmarks.
• Jekyll for statically generating my personal blog.
• Caddy as HTTP server / reverse proxy for all of the above. Automatically provisions certificates from Let‘s Encrypt.
• PostgreSQL as database for Nextcloud and Miniflux.
• Simple Nixos Mailserver for emails with Postfix, Dovecot and rspamd.
• Dehydrated for getting certificates from Let‘s Encrypt for the mail server.
• Btrbk and Restic for backups.

Most of this stuff runs on my server at home (ASRock J4105-ITX, 8 GB RAM , 250 GB SSD, 18 TB HDD). The mail server and the blog run on a cheap VPS (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD). Both servers run NixOS.