ISO Free Intuitive PageMaker-Like Desktop Publishing Software

Looking for a program akin to PageMaker.

Not interested in the following:

Scribus (ridiculous learning curve, inability to control frame properties with sufficient granularity, way too finicky)

OpenOffice (corrupted a save file and flushed 3 months of work down the drain from simply opening the program)

LibreOffice (too finicky, no ability to lay out things how I want)

InDesign (not paying for Adobe to continue putting out products I'm uninterested in)

SwiftPublishing (not free, no idea what it's like, but I'm not wasting money to find out)

I'm sure I'm missing a few.

It's very simple: I want the ability to lay out ten pages or so of normal pages with set margins, then have the remainder of the pages set to a default two column format. You'd think this would be easy. AI is a moron on both Bing and Gemini and continued offering bogus instructions and telling me to look in submenus that do not exist. I don't want friggin' lines around the text boxes, and I want to be able to anchor the text and image boxes TO THE PAGE. NOT the paragraph, NOT the character. None of the above offer that except OpenOffice and no thanks, I'm not putting in 3 months of work again only to have their program randomly decide one day that I've written enough and the file should be scrambled.

Open to ideas for a SIMPLE and INTUITIVE desktop publisher, even if I have to use legacy software and jury rig my macbook to run a VM (no idea how).