I’ve installed W11 for gf and I sorta see the appeal but they clearly had no idea what to do with the whitespace in the bottom left caused by moving the start button and instead filled it with a nonsense button that’ll inevitably get clicked billions of times by people expecting it to be the start button.
flatpaks can do that, but appimages are probably more what you’re looking for. most distros have the required appimage libraries to allow them to run. flatpaks are a bit less portable in my experience but there still just single bundles that you can save to a thumbdrive