It is just how I prefer to do my computing. I tend to live on the command line and pipe programs together to get complex behavior. If you don’t like that, then my approach is not for you and that’s fine. As for your analogy, I see it more as “instead of driving down the road in a car, I like to put my own car together using prefabs”.
Option 4: levy existing tools such as gpg and git using something like pass. That way, you are keeping things simple but it requires more technical knowledge. Depending on your threat model, you may want to invest in a hardware security key such as a yubikey which works well with both gpg and ssh.
That threw me for a loop!
OpenFOAM. I needed powerful software to do CFD that was free, as in free beer, and found OpenFOAM. To run it on windows, the installation instructions first step was install linux on a vm then follow the linux installation instructions. I did that and started using the vm for other stuff until I found myself using the vm for most tasks, but kept using windows for gaming. To learn more, I got myself a pinebook, which replaced most of the usage of my vm. When windows decided to self destruct, I had learnt enough to install and configure arch with minimal help. Now, nothing can persuade me to go back.
I only really use them with the keyboard, desktop mode or any game that uses mouse emulation.