I went from Manjaro to Arch. Installed by command line (took a few tries to get it done… ) I tried their installer but it wasn’t very good. Have also run Endeavour on a second pc for a while but I prefer pure Arch.

The Arch install is much lighter, Endeavour like many other linuxes, installs programs that you may or may not require. I prefer adding programd when I require them

Not that I remember

I keep a diary using Diaro on my android phone. I started a long time ago in note books, but as even I can’t alway read my own writing, switched to typing. I don’t write much, mostly rubbish, what I do find useful is the ability to search and find things, ‘repaired the fridge’ ‘changed the battery in the smoke alarm’, ‘had so and so around for dinner’ , ‘bought this and that’ … It’s only for myself, do when I’m dead and gone it will just disappear like myself

Diaro sends me a notification and the end of the Day, reminding me to write something.

I use timeshift, on Arch and a Debian setup . It’s simple to set up, I do a automatic snapshot once a day, so if something breaks, just boot into tty and restore the previous day’s snapshot, takes about five minutes. Not sure why you say ext4 doesn’t work as it does. Haven’t tried the other programs that you talked about

For note taking, Joplin is pretty good, in fact I went from Simplenote to Evernote (over kill and not free) to Joplin using Dropbox for the syncing (syncing is done by Joplin, so you don’t need a ‘syncing’ app) between my PCs, all Linux and my Android phone. Simple to set up and free. I do not use it as a Journal as that is extremely poor, but for notes, it’s perfect

I don’t use Trillium, tried once Obsidian but it’s not free. Have you tried Joplin, it’s free works extremely well with Dropbox or NextCloud for syncing between téléphone and the PC. For note taking its extremely good

I’ve used Joplin for years now before was Evernote. I like it because it’s open source and the syncing option is built in, exemple either to Dropbox or NextCloud (I use both these options, DB only because I have a free option of 12gB otherwise I would use just NC) The syncing is painless as as I said built-in. It’s not a pretty app, fairly plain, but it works perfectly, on my android and Linix PCs, Arch and Debian. I did try Obsidian once. It’s pretty, but not being open source put me of. Try it again, takes minutes to set up, as again open source and works well

Like you i switched from about 30 years of windows to Linux almost three years ago, Ubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Endeavour before ending up with Arch which I find perfect. I also have two PCs running Debian for HomeAssitant setups in two homes but I don’t like Debian I sometimes use my wife’s Windows setup for Garmin Express as that’s the only windows program that I need. So keep on going, Windows is not missed,