If my American university has a system in place for students that don't own Windows, I would not be surprised if yours has a better one :)

What is a "must have" depends on your use case, personal preferences, and the shortcomings of your distro's default configuration (I've never used Cachy so I don't know what's missing).

For myself, I usually end up installing VLC and Strawberry Media Player, since the media players most distros come with aren't as good. On non-GNOME distros I tend to install GNOME Disks as it's the least painful to use of the GUI partitioning tools I have used. My preferred rich text format is Markdown, for which I use ghostwriter. I also usually install a few FOSS games to pass the time with - my favorites are Freedoom, SuperTux, SuperTuxKart, and Xonotic - and RetroArch for emulation.

Like I said I've only seen the consensus classics there, and it's been a while. I'm planning to see the rest of it as the Greatest Generation podcast covers it. But it is also probably my least favorite Star Trek show.

There's Bodhi Linux, which is basically Ubuntu+Enlightenment.

Yeah, basically. makepkg automates the process of creating an Arch package, and while usually that involves compiling source code, sometimes it just means converting proprietary software that has already been compiled into a different format.

I really liked the simplicity of GNOME To Do when it was around. The successor seems to be GNOME Endeavor, which I haven't tried extensively.

/dev/nvme0 is probably your SSD. But if it passed you probably have nothing to worry about

I suspect Plasma 6 will remove it. Though I'm liking this desktop setup so much I might just keep it for the rest of Debian Bookworm's lifespan.

this is my "gaming" Plasma activity, so in theory everything I play regularly is there :)

i'm personally fine with the windows being slightly brighter, but i think an almost-black theme would look good too... might experiment with that, thanks for the suggestion!

Are you talking about the Chrome extensions announcement? I understood this to be something different

Most of what you can do with Debian and Fedora, you can also do with Mint. You can even install KDE on Mint, and configure it however you want. Debian is a bit nicer to customize, though, because it's extremely stable and most of its apps keep their "vanilla" configurations, or at least a configuration unlikely to cause bugs.

I know Okular can do at least most of that. Don't think it's available for Mac OS X, though.