I’d love to noodle about with Haiku, MorphOS and such, but being hopelessly hooked on tiling window managers (Niri particularily), I’m just stuck on unixes…

Not the greatest; they need time to mature, so often the versions from a couple of years back are more palatable.

If you go with Arch, just sudo pacman -S pro-audio realtime-privileges ; sudo usermod -aG realtime your-user and get rocking (installs everything).

Scrolled a while and didn’t see it:

dd if=image.iso of=/dev/yourstick bs=4M ; sync

And what is yourstick? lsblk and determine by size. Use the device node, not a partition, e.g. /dev/sdb and not /dev/sdb1.

A font viewer, character map app and image / pdf viewer are three clear missing links.

No mention of Capitaine-cursors so there 👈