and a lack of better shit to do

i literally said it’s up to preference, and I don’t have a CS degree, I did in fact figure it out

meta account would be necessary unless there’s another way to run developer tools

i dont mean this in a judgemental way but that sounds like you dont understand or just dislike the process and conflate that with difficulty. the commands aren’t random, you just don’t know them. people who have learned how to use the OS (granted, not everyone has the time for that) generally know what commands do before they paste them in. I have a much easier time running a single command rather than navigating through layers of GUI but not everyone will share that preference

is it a pita because you expect it to function like windows or are there specific roadblocks youve encountered?

I ask because it works fine for me

why not?

findmydevice on fdroid. you can use encrypted pings to your server at set intervals to track each device

I haven’t used Manjaro but you might also be interested in Endeavour as an easy intro to Arch

Pop and Mint require very little setup. They’re both Ubuntu-based but don’t use snaps. Pop offers an iso that bundles nvidia drivers if you need that installed out of the box.