dingdongitsabear
weeell you kinda misrepresented the stated point, creating what's commonly referred to as a strawman.
the subject isn't a random sandwich that might or might not have contaminates in it; the subject is a shit sandwich. therefore it's pointless to argue exactly how much shit is in a shit sandwich, as its essence and genesis preclude it from being considered nourishment.
now there's copious propaganda out there convincing you it isn't that bad, lotsa people do it, memba the sandwich from decades ago you loved... but we're in the wrong community for that.
does it matter how bad it is? does it matter how much shit is in a shit sandwich?
I'm not having it however little there is.
I do without.
no way am I bothering with installing windows, in a VM or elsewhere.
thank you for the elaborate write-up. all them models listed are either way out of my budget, don't support pmOS or are shitty (4 GB RAM, etc). searching GSMArena for 'displayport' nets also 50ish models, all cream of the crop type of deal; I was hoping I'd score a cheap ex-flagship and get myself a nice workstation for experimentation.
in the meantime I've gotten myself a Poco F1 for cheap, I'm now awaiting the week-long bootloader unlock timer to expire and I'll try to use it as a phone only.
you're not mentioning which Pixel you're getting for $200 and also that's only twice the stated budget. anyhow, the cheapest Pixel 7 I have locally available is $310 ("lighty used"), which I think is the lowest rung; sixes are like three years old and that's a no bueno for phones with fixed batteries. as an aside, if I'm buying something someone rubbed their face on, spat on, and rubbed all over, I'm paying half price max, not 15% less than NiB ($355 here).
last week I bought a Poco F1 (SDM845/6GB) in not great condition for $60; excellent LineageOS and PostmarketOS support though and easily replaceable batteries. a month or so prior, a Mi 9T Pro (SDM855/6GB) for $80. those are on the high side, there's a ton of LineageOS supported Xiaomi devices for $50 or less if you go down to SDM6xx/4GB, which is plenty for everyday use. they can be had on the cheap because their MIUI operating system is bloated and hella slow so people just upgrade, whereas unlocking the boot loader and flashing an alternative nets you a super useable device.
I'm not saying any of those is as good as a modern Pixel device, but for my use cases they are more than enough.
it was pretty bad. the "protagonist" was as irritating as they come. evacide, doctorow and co. were super-underutilized, I imagine a huge chunk was cut out to make enough room for mr. annoyance and his forced parables and non-sequiturs.
I understand some things had to be dumbed down, but this was really, really bad from every angle you look at it.
although just a cursory look at the drama surrounding it is reason enough, my real reason is pretty simple: the hardware costs just way too much.
a phone should cost like $100, max. that's an easily breakable thief magnet and you should put in as much effort as possible to treat it as a fungible device. you break or lose one - no big deal, it's encrypted, restore from backup and keep on truckin'.
I can lose/break/gift like 6 or 7 competent devices (SDM680/845/etc, 6 GB RAM) before I even get close to the price of one used Pixel. hard, hard pass.
bazzite is fedora based? If so, your filesystem is btrfs and your /home is a subvolume, same as your / (root). you can install a new operating system in a btrfs subvolume (e.g. /blendosroot), then have systemd-boot or grub mount it as root and mount your existing home from it.
sadly, there's no noob-friendly way to achieve this, but if you're adventurous, you have enough search terms to make it happen.
oh, you can get away with a 350 W PSU if it's a good one, like one from a reputable brand. I was mentioning shitty 500 W PSUs as those are ubiquitous practically everywhere and cost next to nothing.
you'll see if you're ready to rock when you first turn it on, most of the GPUs have a LED near the power connector. if the PSU is adequate, the light is white. if it isn't, it's red.
those are insane prices, I'm very sorry you're in this position. almost everywhere else in the world, prices are driven down by people upgrading to current tech, like the 7000 series, which thne pushes down used 6000-series which then pushes down used 5000-series and so on, and also there being a plethora of old cards used for mining in the olden days that nobody wants to buy.