When zathura (my beloved) isn’t feature-rich enough for my needs I usually turn to okular. Sure, it’s kde, so if you’re on a pure gnome system you’re going to have to install a bunch of dependencies, but if that’s not a problem for you, okular is quite good in my experience!
You could try spacemacs (what I use) or doom emacs. Both have vi-like keybindings as a default and are slightly easier to get going with than vanilla emacs. On the other hand, especially with spacemacs, there’s more to learn than vanilla emacs and more that can go wrong.
what, on the surface, is a pretty trivial ask
I don’t think having my real life phone number tied to a website or game account is a trivial ask. I’d like my data to be private, especially something as real-life and tangible as a fucking phone number. Sure, there are ways around these things, you can get a fake phone number for cheap (or possibly even free), but that’s rather more effort than I’m willing to put in for most things. If I need to enter a phone number to sign up for an account for something, chances are very extremely good I’ll just decide I don’t need the account that badly. I don’t think I’m alone in this.
For years I used vanilla vim before finally switching to spacemacs like 4 years ago. I’ve never used neovim, because it just didn’t seem stable and mature enough before I switched to spacemacs and at this point I’m happy with spacemacs and will probably stick with it for the foreseeable future.
My issue with vim, and the reason I switched, is that vimscript was an absolute nightmare. I was doing easy stuff, writing LaTeX, but getting vim to compile LaTeX and talk to my pdf reader (as you need if you’re going to be working with LaTeX in any kind of serious way) took way too much configuration and my setup would break fairly often as well. Spacemacs is significantly easier. I was shocked when I went from “I’ve never used spacemacs before” to “I’m comfortably writing LaTeX here” in about half an hour. My setup still breaks occasionally and sometimes it’s a bit difficult to figure out why and how to fix it, but it’s much easier than vim was, that’s for sure.
I also just like the emacs workflow. I like helm, I like being able to change how the editor works on the fly just by writing some elisp anywhere, I like how easy it is to access the documentation on functions, variables, keybindings, whatever else you might need. I like org-mode. I like that emacs has been around for decades and will be around for decades more.
I’d never heard of doomemacs. I’m pretty happy with spacemacs so I probably won’t switch, but I’ll at least read about it some more.
Sometimes the 3 second emacs startup time is annoying so I use vim then.
The way I get around this is by using emacs in daemon mode. So it only has a long startup if I’ve just rebooted my computer or if I needed to change my config and manually restart emacs. You probably already know emacs can run as a daemon, but I thought I’d mention it anyway!
Sounds like you’ve gotten good answers about your formatting question. For the steam proton question, the answer is that yes, steam installs it automatically. You might have to mess with the proton version for specific games, so check https://www.protondb.com/ for your game if it doesn’t work immediately.
Congrats on trying out Linux! I hope you enjoy it! I’ve never used Mint myself (I don’t like ubuntu-type package management), nor the Cinnamon desktop (although I’ve heard good things), but that’s part of the beauty of linux, there’s so much to try! Mint is definitely a good starter distro, but if you find you enjoy messing around with it, you might consider a bit of distro-hopping.
Sure, that’s extremely fair! Those qt dependencies are no joke! How do you feel about Evince (apparently now called gnome document viewer)? It seems to be the standard gtk pdf viewer, but I’ve never used it, so I actually don’t know what it’s features are like. It’s a heavier application than mupdf (of course), but at least you don’t need to install qt to use it!