So far I’ve been having a good time with Sober on Fedora (apart from semi-regular crashing but I’m willing to attribute that to my Gt 1030)

Please do! I’m curious to hear about the specifics, mainly in how you set up administration (as Windows does have surprisingly good group admin tools)

Actually, for flatpaks specifically, even by the software manager it won’t ask for root privileges and go straight to installing
Check up on it, that’s my experience at least and I’ve got my own laptop running the latest version of Linux Mint. It could be some change in config you’ve done