A lot of this is personal preference but I will suggest the following strategy. Mount all of your drives into subfolders of /mnt or /media (/mnt is usually used for more permanent storage but either is fine). Then symlink various folders on the system to this mount point. Like maybe you want your home folder downloads on one of these drives so /home/spawnsalot/Downloads is symlinkef to /mnt/drive1/Downloads.

This lets you pick and choose various places across your system that are actually on the additional drives but also the ability to see everything on the drives in one place.

Game installation location completely depends on the game itself. Some might install to /usr/bin, others to /opt, etc. You might have to dig around a little after install, move the folder, then symlink it like nothing ever happened.

It’s a work provided device. It was either that or Windows, so it was really the only option. I might try out some tiling options for it, not sure how upset IT will be about that though…

I spent years using i3 as my main machine and I loved everything about it. Fast forward to now where I have to use a Mac. Most of the time I’m in a terminal with tmux so it’s fine but any time I have to deal with a gui element that is under something else I get more and more upset.

I’ve had buttons stop working. The mechanism inside that registers the click is a mechanical switch and they eventually die

If it were me and I was intending to automate this I would probably do the following. Set up each test distro as a VirtualBox image and take a snapshot so I could easily roll back. Then I would write a script for each distro that downloaded the package, installed and launched the app. I would then probably query the window system to make sure the gui showed up, wait a period of time if I had to and take a screenshot.

This can probably all be done as a set of bash scripts.