I prefer the tty over session managers because I generally throw in a system update before starting the gui in case it warrants a reboot. Also if you're feeling spicy you can tell it to load the desktop on a specific GPU with $ DRI_PRIME=1 startplasma-wayland, for example.
This is the real issue. If ReactOS actually became useful, Microsoft will act against them. Doesn't matter how cleanly they reverse engineered their implementation, ReactOS most likely don't have the funds to deal with any legal battles.
The only time I've had any kind of crash was when I did a major KDE update while in KDE, but even then it consisted of the shell crashing and reloading itself. Which I took as a sign that I should restart KDE.
To search for a package, in the main repo or the AUR:
$ paru -Ss search-term
With the search results, it clearly labels if something is from the AUR or extras or the main repo, and you can make it show AUR results first or last in the config.
Not sure why noone has pointed this out but if you use paru or yay instead of pacman, installing/searching the AUR is the same as if they are in the main repo. It does all the building etc for you.
When I need an office suite, Libreoffice is the one I use, but it's so infrequent that I reinstall writer or whatever part I need at the time and then uninstall again.
The main reason it bothers me is I will see it being updated frequently (and they're not small updates) - and I've probably never ran the thing since the last OS install most of the time.
Let's not shorten his name to Turtle. 😓