I like Bread on Penguins - very informative now that Luke Smith has turned away from Linux and towards Communist Philosophist or whatever he now turned into.
I don’t need reproducibility to the extent that NixOS provides
Alright, that's fair. As a programmer, I've been having a blast using it - being able to quickly setup my laptops almost the same as my desktop is such a breath of fresh air, then being able to copy over most of my config to a WSL setup to employ nix to get there 90% of the way on a Debian or Ubuntu WSL system is just sonice.
But if you don't need its features, or aren't a programmer, I can very much imagine you'd rather stick to a more stateful system.
Start with pen and paper - no computer, because that'll just distract you.
Write down what kind of game you want to make. Sketch out what you want your player to see when they play the game (top down, third person, first person; which UI elements should they see? Health? Mana or power bars? Selected items?). Does it have a story of sorts? What kind of setting (future, past, fantasy, sci-fi). 2D or 3D? What kind of visual style are you going for (realistic, cartoony, abstract?).
This will be your Game Design Document. You don't have to get it perfectly at the first go - iterate over it, scratch things that you feel won't work.
Once you have something that looks like a minimally viable product (MVP), THEN you can start making something in Godot, Game Maker, or Love2D. Because now you have something to follow along. Try to get something out ASAP, because feedback from people who are not you is important. Maybe you made something that feels fun to you, but no one else likes it - you would want to know that as soon as possible, not after toiling away for 5 years.
Do not start caring about "what is the fastest programming language". Even the slowest of languages are fine, because you're learning how to build a game, not how to program like a pro.
I tried Thunderbird. Didn't like it, at all. Evolution is much more my jam.