I'm doing all this messing around with CentOS Stream and Fedora Silverblue on the laptop, while the desktop remains on Debian Stable. I don't remember a "bad" Debian release, but Bullseye is a particularly good one. A sweet spot for GNOME (3.38).
I used rpm-ostree to layer vim-enhanced and vim-X11 in Fedora Silverblue. The Vim Flatpak didn't give me console Vim, and Silverblue Vim wasn't picking up my .vimrc.