Symlinking is great and should be a great way to keep the data safe while you nuke the OS, IMHO.
On linuxes, I'm quite a fan of the KDE and their range of customizations, but I like the Linux Mint approach the best, and its in theory kind of what we do with NTLite: they take vanilla Ubuntu (or Debian in some versions), and tweak it to their liking, then release it on the wild. For gaming though, while it has advanced greatly, I fear until they make Wayland the de-facto standard, or somehow resurrect and fix X11 problems (which I doubt it), and iron out the deal-breaking bugs of it, Linux will still be the second option of an operational system for most people. For me, most of what I want and need works on there, so I'm comfy, but the latest and greatest broke NVidia support on my machine (Dell's fault for making a non standard USB-C port that 'exists in the firmware but not in the hardware'), so I need to wait a few versions to go back to it.
On linuxes, I'm quite a fan of the KDE and their range of customizations, but I like the Linux Mint approach the best, and its in theory kind of what we do with NTLite: they take vanilla Ubuntu (or Debian in some versions), and tweak it to their liking, then release it on the wild. For gaming though, while it has advanced greatly, I fear until they make Wayland the de-facto standard, or somehow resurrect and fix X11 problems (which I doubt it), and iron out the deal-breaking bugs of it, Linux will still be the second option of an operational system for most people. For me, most of what I want and need works on there, so I'm comfy, but the latest and greatest broke NVidia support on my machine (Dell's fault for making a non standard USB-C port that 'exists in the firmware but not in the hardware'), so I need to wait a few versions to go back to it.