Thank you for your feedback! I am learning a lot. This is the first time I have run into issues where I was not tempted to abandon ship and go back to what works. I actually care about this system and want it to succeed. I think this is a super cool path forward.
The only other time I felt this interested in a new paradigm of linux was GoboLinux with its compartmentalized installation of programs, so you can have every version you need, but I got confused with the recipe system and I don’t know if it is still active.
One problem I had is that I was trying to download an image for linux mint, because it gives me access to PPAs without needing to use SNAP due to Ubuntu, but I could not get an image to download, no matter what combination of linux + mint + version I used. I finally realized I could search podman, now I can go forward!