Nothing irks me more than "check out my neat-o PCB design" and there's no schematic.
I wish that existed for more weird binary formats. Altium have 365 but you have to have signins to use it, and they cost named-user seats.
(Unfortunately, it does not zoom on the cursor but on the center of the screen).
Vertical panning is then accomplished by rolling the scrollwheel. Horizontal scrolling can be accomplished by tilting the scrollwheel on a mouse that is so-equipped.
(Perhaps bizarrely, I was unable to discover any other way to pan.)
If you don't like it.. well it's a free world and every engineer has it own preferences :-)
But for a hobby project I really don't see the need. It takes a few extra minutes to install KiCAD, clone the repo, and view the schematic at any point in time.
But the joke was on me — when I tried to open the PCB file, KiCad said: "KiCad was unable to open this file because it was created with a more recent version than the one you are running. To open it you will need to upgrade KiCad to a version dated 12/29/2024 or later."
So I now think your position is reasonable. Also I think I need to upgrade Debian.
Always have the right version for it "locked". It works well with most tools except those that save stuff in the .config folder as it messes up isolation.
If you find the nix language daunting, for basic stuff like nix shell setup its easy but also LLMs are good for it.