I don’t think btop even records to any output file, it’s more of a “taskmanager with graphs” than a logging utility.

btop? it’s pretty customizable, if a bit too flashy (by default) to my liking. https://github.com/aristocratos/btop - should be available on repositories for most distros.

Defender is antimalware/antivirus. There at least used to be a separate firewall in windows, but not sure if it’s a part of defender or not.

Either way, “firewall” is traffic control, antimalware/virus is the execution guardian.

you can always add eg. a swap file later if needed - apparently not as good as a swap partition, but it is more flexible. With 48 GB of ram I hardly think you’re going to have issues, but that depends entirely on what do you do with the system.

Firewall isn’t really helping the system against you, it’s to block ousiders getting in - more or less.

install locations: if you just use what’s in mint’s repositories, you don’t really need to think about it. Out-of-repository stuff like steam games etc generally live in ~/.steam or so. Or in some dedicated path you configure in steam/whatever.

As for snap/flatpaks/whatever, haven’t used a single one. But in general: I’d favor the distribution’s repos, if at all possible for installs. If the app isn’t there, but is in snap… fine, I guess? As long as it’s managed by some kind of package manager for easy install/update/uninstall. But having to manually download and install from a website? Rather not, that’s when the maintenance becomes manual.

And of course, opinions are opionated. Your system, your rules. :P