A piece of software always runs locally. It is in some cases those who needs to communicate with the server fail to deliver the usual function you expect when offline.
Please do not confuse one to another.
And perhaps you can start by complaining which services you are using heavily rely on the server side? General questions attract general answers and IMHO you are better off just search on the internet.
1/10 Do not recommend
Want to learn? Buy a current computer (secondhand to save money) that has a blazing fast CPU, shit loads of RAM, and any AMD graphics card. Running into trouble is no fun for beginners. You’ll quickly feel depressed and lose interest.
For the learning part, follow any distro’s official installation guide and do it step by step. Learn which part of the systems does what, and how to set it up, how to debug.
And stick to Ethernet connection before you get comfortable. (Shitty) Wi-fi ICs more often than not have driver issues.
For the old laptop, sell it for parts if you’re not feeling nostalgic.
For the last time, buy a new computer, please.
Back in the day when embedded devices are running Linux kernel 2.6, the kernel is gzipped and saved to an SPI flash, then extracted to RAM and run from there.
Does that sound immutable enough to you?
The decision on this design wasn’t for an immutable system, but just that flash chips were expensive. Immutability was an accidental achievement.
Actually we developers dreamed every day we can directly modify the operating system ad hoc, not needing to go through the compile-flash-boot agonising process just to debug a config file.
You see, my point is, when a system is in good hands, it just does not break. End of story.
Maybe the next time before you guys press Enter after pacman -Syyu (not exclusively saying your distro is bad, Arch pals, sorry), think about the risk and recovery plan. If you are just an end user expecting 100% uptime and rarely contributing (reporting bugs at least), consider switch to a more stable distro (I heard Debian is good), and ask yourself if you want an immutable distro, or do you just want a super stable system.
And I heard Figma is a heavy adopter of WebAssembly which could be faster when running not in a wrapper like Electron. Since it is WebAssembly one can imagine the so-called “desktop version” has to be also WebAssembly and it has to have a wrapper around it.
If all these are true, OP just need to find a way to load the fonts into the web version.