I think it’s a fairly standard feature. At least Protonmail also supports this kind of “alias”.

I think this should work assuming that the game and mods are compatible with proton. Also, you don’t need an external drive, you can access the windows partition from linux (probably not the other way around though since linux understands NTFS but windows doesn’t understand ext4). If there are any issues, maybe try the “Verify Game Files” feature of steam. This might remove the mods but at least you don’t have to download the game again.

I think Plex is not open source but is there any reason against Jellyfin? As far as I know, they also have apps for most smart TVs in case that’s what you mean by navigating with a remote.

In my experience, a good way to get a polished desktop with a tiling workflow is to use KDE / GNOME with a few extensions & i3 shortcuts. Unless you really care about customizing every part of your DE, the work of configuring i3 to match a proper DE in terms of polish might not be worth it.

I previously used GNOME with the Forge extension and a few simple extensions for a workspace indicator, disabling the workspace switch animation, etc. This worked quite well but since GNOME is not very configurable, you have to do a lot of that through extensions (e.g. disabling the workspace switch animation & popup). This is particularly annoying since GNOME updates tend to break extensions.

For that reason, I recently switched to KDE. Polonium is a very nice tiling plugin for it. Since KDE is pretty customizable, I didn’t really need a lot of other extensions to support my workflow. It’s mainly a matter of configuring keyboard shortcuts and a few other settings. I haven’t used KDE long enough to say how stable everything is under updates, but from what I’ve heard it should be a lot better than GNOME.

I personally use NixOS and Home Manager with the Plasma Manager module for KDE. It’s a steep learning curve but if you have fun learning new stuff it is worth it in my opinion.

Otherwise, a GNOME / KDE tiling setup will probably also be mostly reproducible if you just track your dot files. There’s always a bit of manual configuration but it’s also difficult to completely avoid that with NixOS (although probably possible).