Question: Is using paperclips a worse alternative? I’ve found them useful for those sim pinholes but im not entirely sure if its good practice

When an app supports linux, it can do so by either:

• packaging it for popular distro repositories,
• giving instructions on how to build the app from the source code

or

• package it on distro-agnostic, package management solutions like flatpak or appImage.

These last ones are sandboxed environments. That means they have their own dependencies isolated from your system, so they dont have to deal with every distros pecularities at the cost of using more storage space. This is very useful for developers and in your case benefitial for the user because you can have both steam and zoom via flatpak on mint, arch or any obscure distro that has flatpak available, without any major problems.

Edit: Formatting