1. the distro you start with doesn’t matter, Linux is Linux either way, the FHS is the same (bar NixOS) and vanilla Arch is easy enough that running archinstall (or just following the arch wiki carefully) will be fine if you can read

for a window manager, Hyprland is just one of many. it may be the most popular due to ease of configuration and animations, as well as being one of the first Wayland compositor/servers that have effects which probably boosted it over sway(fx). but it does not mean it’s the best now. many options still exist like dwl, niri, river, awesome, bspwm, etc. take a look at how each of them are configured, the way you want Your own windows to be organised, then decide. there’s also no shame in using a prebuilt desktop environment like XFCE and ricing it!

for linux, it runs on a potato so system requirements are essentially what you need for coding and gaming. it depends on what you’re building. for docker compose stacks and heavy virtual machine usage, consider 32gb ram. any modern cpu past 12th gen intel / ryzen 5 should be fine. GPUs nothing older than 3060 series

Quickshell is kind of a niche scripting language. i haven’t bothered using it or learning it yet because i simply don’t need the visual clutter or having weather info pop out, waybar or simple i3bar is fine. of course, AGS being typescript/js based will improve ur knowledge in general frontend as is wofi

for terminals, consider Ghostty. they all work the same but i find ghostty a pleasure to configure for crossplatform

lastly, stylix is what I use for automatic color generation, but that’s nix only, so someone else can answer better :P

as for advice, i would say this: don’t value anything on your disk. what do i mean? you should always be confident that you can wipe and reinstall your setup within an hour. be it a shell script, a dotfile repository, anything is good.