Wow, your hardware specs. That’s a machine to die for LOL

I don’t use one, it’s unnecessary. Keep your system light, use only free software and utilize some of your common sense and you’ll be all right.
This one time my brother had his pc(winblows) infested just by plugging in a flash-drive, seriously, just that!!. I hate proprietary software.

I’m a huge proponent of the command line, but you often spend more time learning tools and configuring your environment than getting work done.

I agree with this. I remember spending soo much of my time learning and configuring my environment, the time just seemed to fly by.
These days I prefer to just log into xfce and get some work done. I still use my sweet setup of bspwm from time to time tho, will not forget it.

Same old. I have an exam this Friday, just wanna get it over with so I can concentrate more on reading and writing.

Lmao. This is actually a thing.

I might give this a try. I want to explore something else besides emacs.