ElRenosaurusReg

Have you considered doing stupid shit and used Bedrock Linux?

It's great, but it's still baking

Dualshock 4 is great.

If you're not gonna use it often and want a cheaper one, the Logitech F710 (wireless version of the f310) is great, just don't use it for your submarines

Install the DEs manually instead of from metapackages so ,out don't end up with their entire software suites being installed. Additionally, probably use Debian instead of Ubuntu if you're gonna be doing stuff like that, less fingers in the pie make for an easier tinkering experience.

So, the big thing with instability is that with Linux "Unstable" refers to "Constantly receiving updates" rather than "Breaks all the time"

In my experience, if arch breaks, 99% of the time YOU the user did it.

If you want a kinkless experience with it, keep it simple.

Arch ships with systemd, as such, it also ships with systemd-boot. Use what's built, don't add additional bootloaders unless you need the functionality they offer.

Gnome, Matlab, and VScode have wiki pages for installation and configuration, and Firefox is in the repos and is one line in the terminal to install (#pacman -S firefox)

For a first install, I'd recommend following the wiki to install instead of using archinstall to familiarize yourself with how to use and read the wiki.

The only thing they block is the eyes, nothing is obscured otherwise, their own demos on their website show that.

I personally won't be wasting my money, if I want to obscure my face I'll wear a face mask and color contacts like I already do.

Forced Snaps is a big one. If you're not familiar, Snap is Canonical's proprietary alternative to Appimage and Flatpak. While the Snap Store is open source and can be forked or modified as needed, the backend is completely closed source, which has vexed many members of the Open Source community.

While the distribution itself is currently pretty solid, they've made questionable decisions in the past like including an amazon search function in their fork of gnome (Unity). Snap can be removed by a skilled user or someone well versed in search-fu, but their choice to have it installed by default, the be the default for package management, and to inject snaps in place of deb packages when installed via Apt, are all big red-flags given that nobody can see what is in those snaps til they're installed except for canonical.