It used to be, Snap ootb is remarkably horrible, I had a not-good internet plan and Snap drove me crazy with its updates, I could've settled fine if auto updates could be switched off, but nope, they're shoved down my throat, I'd say Mint is a better starter distro

I'm running Plasma 5 on my i5 5200U on iGPU on X11 and it's pretty much stable and solid (it's not riced a lot though), isn't Plasma 6 still pre-release?

Def bottom right

PFPs are bloat

Endeavor allows you to pick from a number of DEs/WMs on installationa

I guess you could try an immutable distro (Fedora Silverblue comes to mind) if you want something that just works and you don't want to use it for programming

It's not about including, it's about forcing, my laptop still has an HDD and when that garbage dropped I kept my laptop idle (couldn't use it since HDD usage was rocking 100%) for like 6 freaking hours, my HDD isn't that empty either so I don't know what the heck my PC was doing

Imo it's better that you wait, you could try installing vanilla Arch in a vm and distrohop once you're ready, if PopOS is suiting all your needs imo there's no reason to get Arch on bare metal (A vm for fun and learning would be satisfying ig), on a side note, getting the proprietary NVIDIA driver to run is very simple in vanilla Arch (like a 4 steps or so)

Sektor?

It doesn't always go well, especially with beginners, I've tried Plasma on Ubuntu and decided to go back to gnome, spent whole lot of time trying to purge all the Plasma bloat but couldn't

Other hosters gaining more popularity, among other reasons, GitHub is owned by one of the worst companies around, I found Codeberg and switched there, now almost all of my projects live on Codeberg, mirrored to GitHub cause I don't expect an employer would follow a link to Codeberg if I solely include it on my CV

As a fellow developer who recently moved to Arch, it's great, the installation process was a tiny bit frustrating (I did test it first in a VM) but after that it works as intended, I keep my eyes on the wiki though if any issues happen, nvidia driver works well with PRIME too, although I don't use it much (I dualboot for the sake of gaming), if you feel like you need to have even MORE control over your PC than your vanilla Debian or Fedora experiences, I guess Arch is the next step, on a side note, minimal Void Linux installation is very similar to what you get with Arch so in case you used that you already have a taste of what you're getting into, well, plus having access to the AUR :)

Oh also, I'm not sure about MATLAB, but Octave has been shipped as MATLAB compatible (although it haven't been the case for me with some functionalities...) Maybe you'll need a Windows VM if Octave wasn't enough, or maybe it runs using WINE I haven't bothered trying it