- Whenever you want, but keep an eye out for announcements for updates. (You can also receive desktop notifications for new updates following this guide).
- Steam Gaming Mode and Desktop Mode do the exact same thing, but since Steam doesn’t easily allow us to show an output of what’s happening or use our own changelogs (you only see SteamOS’s changes). Desktop Mode shows a real-time output of the upgrade.
- I update everything at once like it’s intended. If a Flatpak application breaks, downgrade it with Warehouse temporarily.
- Don’t sweat it, like you’re aware of, rollbacks and rebasing to older images exist to return from a bad system upgrade or an upstream Linux issue plaguing your hardware.
You also don’t have to be up to date all the time especially if this hardware is mostly just used for gaming most of the time. You can make your own schedule for it if you feel comfortable doing that, bi-weekly or monthly works. Not really something built-in, but like a reminder on your phone or similar.