I’ve heard Bazzite mentioned repeatedly as a popular distro for Linux gaming (and I plan to test drive it on my old laptop soneday when I get around to it). My understanding is that it’s a standalone distro you can run locally, same as Debian/Arch/Ubuntu/etc. I suspect the “cloud native” marketing term in this context just means you can run the same image file in a vm, vps, bare metal, whatever.

If I’m dead wrong, hopefully my reply will be sufficiently inflammatory to trigger a correction, lol.

I have a Brother color laser printer (technically it’s like LED or something? not home, don’t have the exact model handy). It has built in wifi and ethernet for network printing. The wifi isn’t configured, and the ethernet is manually configured with a static IP for my LAN… but no gateway address. This breaks outgoing network connections to the internet (as evidenced by the printer’s inability to check for firmware updates), while behaving otherwise normally for all my LAN devices. I hope this info is useful!

ZeroTier might suit your use case. It’s super easy to setup.

Maybe see if ‘rclone mount’ solves the problem for ya. Rclone can often be a super handy swiss army knife for stuff like this.