Does LMDE do wayland? If not, I wouldn’t bother.
Bazzite or some other Fedora variant. Nobara has some tweaks for nVidia, full codec support, and specifically supports programs like daVinci Resolve, KDenlive and OBS Studio in the Welcome screen. Not an immutable distro like Bazzite though, which depending on how you like to install stuff, might not be a bad thing.
The railways were built privately for the most part, and eventually most of them defaulted on loans and became CN. Which I guess was public for a long time, but competed with a number of private operators still like CP. Via was a heavily subsidized passenger crown corp because nobody could make passenger service profitable.