FYI, the options at boot have nothing to do with this. At boot you might have different options for different OS's. When you pick linux, it will start up. Only after login will a DE/WM like Gnome/Nimdow start. If you install multiple WM's, they will not show up in your boot menu. Some login managers allow you to switch between them at login.
I don't know if you should, but you can. I use Artix for my only computer (also used for uni). It never killed itself. I did once, which was my fault. But I just fixed it.
but depending on who you ask Arch is either the most stable distro they’ve ever used or bricked their pc ten seconds into the install process
This very funny, and true. Arch is almost as stable as its user :)
Arch do argue themselves that it is the point of Arch that you configure the system yourself: https://archlinux.org/about/
Of course, one can build on top of it with different aims.
Manjaro claims to be user-friendly on their homepage, but I can't find further philosophy/about/design decisions where they explicitly state why they changed certain things.
As far as I understand only Arch packages that depend on systemd need an Artix equivalent. You should be able to enable both Artix and Arch repos and everything should be fine, you should be able to run pacman -Syu without any problems. I never had problems in the last 3 years. If you tried it more than 3 years ago it might be a different story.
There are some DAWs like Ardour and LMMS for linux. The bigger issue is plugins. They are mostly NOT for Linux. There are some but the selection is not big. You can use a VST-bridge like Carla. It worked for me, I could use proprietary windows based VSTs in LMMS on Linux. However, I wanted to go fully FOSS. This is rather difficult. You make it sound like there are a bunch of open source plugins. This was not my experience. Especially not if you are looking for more specific things. If it is like that, shit has changed radically for the best the last two years. I had some coding projects related to music production so I would just try to build whatever I needed. But I dropped these projects unfortunately.
If you do a lot with your keyboard, it is annoying to get your hand off it and switch to your mouse. And then to switch back. If a task can also be done with the keyboard, you can just stay there and that is quite comfy.
You state that you regret setting up a few communities in lemmy.world, but only state trouble with lemmy.ml. Did you have any trouble on lemmy.world, regarding anime communities?
All this time I thought that an existential crisis was having a crisis about the fact that you exist, not about the fact that you will not exist in the future.
Bacon is just compiler output but it "stays open" in your terminal and refreshes after you save your file; It is nice if you use something a bit minimal like vim without language server but you don't want to compile manually every time.
Selection of my fish abbreviations for comfy terminal creatures:
# MISC -----------------
abbr -a la 'exa -la'
abbr -a p 'python'
abbr -a v 'nvim'
abbr -a rmd 'rm -rf'
abbr -a feh 'feh --scale-down -d'
abbr -a ka 'doas killall'
abbr -a fp 'ffplay'
abbr -a ff 'firefox'
abbr -a tree 'exa -T'
abbr -a libver 'dpkg -l | grep'
abbr -a ex 'chmod +x'
# specific file and directory based
abbr -a notes 'nvim ~/.vimwiki/index.md'
abbr -a idir 'cd ~/some/important/dir'
abbr -a fishconf 'nvim ~/.config/fish/config.fish'
abbr -a vimconf 'nvim ~/.config/nvim/init.vim'
abbr -a i3conf 'nvim ~/.config/i3/config'
# PACMAN ---------------
abbr -a pin 'doas pacman -S'
abbr -a pun 'doas pacman -Rns'
abbr -a pss 'pacman -Ss'
abbr -a pls 'pacman -Qd'
abbr -a aurls 'paru -Qm'
abbr -a pct 'pacman -Q | wc -l'
abbr -a syu 'paru -Syu'
abbr -a pcl 'paccache -r -k 1; paru --cc;'
abbr -a pfd 'pacman -Qs'
# GIT ------------------
abbr -a ga 'git add -A; git status'
abbr -a gr 'git reset'
abbr -a gd 'git diff'
abbr -a gc 'git commit -m'
abbr -a gdc 'git diff HEAD~0 --stat'
abbr -a gl 'git log'
abbr -a gb 'git branch'
abbr -a gp 'git push origin'
abbr -a gch 'git checkout'
abbr -a gam 'git commit --amend - m'
abbr -a gcl 'git clone'
# RUST -----------------
abbr -a cc 'cargo clippy --all-features'
abbr -a ccc 'cargo check'
abbr -a cb 'cargo build'
abbr -a cr 'cargo run'
abbr -a cbr 'cargo build --release'
abbr -a crr 'cargo run --release'
abbr -a ct 'cargo test'
abbr -a ctt 'cargo tarpaulin --ignore-tests --skip-clean'
abbr -a bacon 'bacon clippy-all -w'
abbr -a cil 'cargo install --path ./'
abbr -a cia 'cargo install-update -a'
abbr -a ca 'cargo add'
FYI, the options at boot have nothing to do with this. At boot you might have different options for different OS's. When you pick linux, it will start up. Only after login will a DE/WM like Gnome/Nimdow start. If you install multiple WM's, they will not show up in your boot menu. Some login managers allow you to switch between them at login.