I installed steam by going into my discover app, searching for steam, and clicking install. This is how I get most things, excepting a few appimages I downloaded that just work. I change my settings via GUIs that came with KDE. The only extra configuration GUIs I installed were pavucontrol (just like it for some reason) and protontricks (for doing weird stuff with games most people never need to do).
I don’t know what distro/de/wm you’re using right now but what you’re saying doesn’t need to be the case. Linux desktop is honestly working better than windows for me lately.