Any mastodon client? Also can I recommend the Right apps collection from Goodwy and Voyager as Lemmy client (I think they match the requirements to figure on your list).

The general idea is that a desktop environment provides you with common graphical user interface elements such as icons, toolbars, wallpaper, and desktop widgets. In other terms it's purely an aesthetic question. You can also decide which of these features will be useful to you and install the appropriate package(s) if you don't want to grab the bundle that comes with any DE.

As far of timing is concerned, you can always experiment and install what you need as you go. The only downside to wait will depend on how good your distro is in managing packages dependencies.

Personaly, my Linux journey made me realize that the features offer by a DE were actually negatively impacting my productivity and a windows manager (a tiling one for me) was all I needed. But this decision - like a lot of others - comes down to personal tastes. Note that not using a DE doesn't mean relying on the terminal only.

Influence is a curse in today's world. I've made this final selection of brands based on personal choice and for reasons exposed in this post. But it's all personal so you may disagree with some/all candidates and that's perfectly fine. I've posted here to actually collect as much opinions as possible so thanks for sharing yours.

Companies always find a way to justify for higher price to sell you not that good hardware or to overprice their stuff for non sense reasons. As anyone else (except fan boys of any given brand) I'm running away from that. In my personal views, companies on this list have reasonable offers considering their history, clients pool, philosophy...

Framework is maybe the best deal here because it has good price and all parts of their machines are replaceable. And again, prices for the parts are fair. So in the long run, users may be winners if the company doesn't crash. If it does then it won't be worth than having bought from another company. With all the options to build the laptop you want for your needs it really make me feel like customizing my Linux system but from a hardware standpoint. It's a big plus for me to pay only for what I want/need and with them you can go even further by physically positioning your ports on the fly. That's an unseen degree of freedom and it has real world applications.

Thanks for a nice feedback. One more vote for Framework ;)
I don't use a DE, so this would not make me go with them. Also, I'll use Arch anyway, not PopOS.

Have you looked at KISS? Extremely lightweight and customizable. You can go from the most minimalist approach with text only and selection of apps to show to crash things like visual effects and icons for every single installed app.

Both iosevka and fira look nice.

You're right.

Exactly.

I've been scrolling with no hope to see st anywhere but here it is! Only mentioned twice for now but this little guy deserves so much love. Yes, you have to build it (i.e. patch it) but that's actually it's beauty. You get the exact terminal you want, nothing more, nothing less. If you're looking for power and lightweight this is your guy.
Coupled with tmux and you're the God of your system :)

I use ytfzf to search/watch videos on YouTube, Peertube, Odysee.
It has several add-ons including one for playlists. I didn't try it though.

I can see that from a server maintenance point of view. After having read so many great things about NixOS, I may have exaggerated my expectation and I may be the problem for being a user with too limited needs to get the full benefits of NixOS.

For me this single config file doesn't save that much additional files and most of them would be files you configure only once during installation. Nonetheless I can see how "easier" it would be to save one file instead of 3 to reproduce your system and I can only imagine how much better it is from a server point of view.

Right, I didn't know updating firmware from the fwupd service was came pre-installed in Pop_OS.
So you only have one more task on your list: enjoying your new laptop! :)