Yes

Btrfs, but if I’d start from scratch today I’d go for bcachefs.

You should keep up with i3 or Sway. They will provide you with most of what you need for actually getting things done. Others you just will further yourself in an endless configuration rabbit hole

virtmanager as frontend for qemu/kvm. I tried the commandline but it’s too annoying

Helix or GNU Emacs, you can’t go wrong

22 hours battery life

Not even Macs M series are getting that much.

How is that different from Arch other than being an actual PITA having to compile stuff?

I’m miserable because I spend all my time tinkering the computer instead of doing anything actually useful: NixOS, GNU Emacs, Xmonad

Couldn’t you just save in the excel format?

It was great with my CS program. The only issues I had were due to me using some tiling WM so it was harder to make HDMI work for presentations, and then when I switched from Arch to NixOS it was too much of hassle… so should have been way smoother just staying on Arch

Wayland here as well, but I don’t see compositors having xmonad functionality that I need