Personally my arch install is almost boring me with how stable it’s been - and if anything goes wrong, it backs itself up before and after every single update plus on every boot just cuz, so I can roll back to wherever I want. I’ve put a lotta work into building out all these redundancies I’m happy with, and arch has been so goddamn stable I haven’t even had an excuse to use them. The process of getting a complete install was absolutely not “it works” - but now that I’m there, yeah, it really does just work. My only complaint is that I don’t have any reason to tinker with it more.

It physically hurts me to say anything in facebook’s defence, but to be fair this is an account centre link to an account config page

I didn’t consider account recovery, that’s a good point. Personally I don’t usually bother with it for anything I want to be private - if I lose it I lose it lol.
It’s still not perfect, but some of the private email hosting providers like proton have email aliases, so you could use one for recovery without giving any info to hackers (assuming you trust the email provider). Definitely less secure than only a public key being exposed, but maybe an acceptable tradeoff for the convenience of an existing established solution?

You rule out social networks, but why? Wouldn’t a fediverse microblogging (or full blogging) platform work fine for the purpose? Just pick an irrelevant username and a strong+unique password and only access your account through tor using any and all relevant best practices.
Given you want the continuity of the author preserved, I don’t see the functional difference between the posts being associated with an anonymous account and them all having your public key. Am I missing something?

Honestly I’ve found the opposite of what you said, where on Debian based distros I commonly had to go to a project’s git repo and follow readme instructions to build when it wasn’t in an apt repository. Meanwhile on arch, the only thing you have to install manually is yay and then afterwards everything is in the AUR. Not saying that makes arch more user friendly than Debian (obviously), but that one aspect I do actually find easier on arch at least if you’re willing to use an AUR helper.

I don’t think I’d call it anything wrong, but the subvolumes definitely do make it different for installation purposes so that following ext4 instructions for bootloader configs or kernel arguments could put you on the wrong path

Some desktop environments (plasma 6 at least) support it when running in Wayland - my daily driver for months has been an HDR setup (with a nvidia gpu, even) and it’s been great. It’s not quite ready for non-technical users, but imo it’s not far off and I can’t wait for it to be more common.

Yea as opposed to the windows method of “just open regedit and navigate 8 folders below HKEY_CURRENT_USER to change some ambiguous system variable in hex” lmao

I’ll take editing a text file in /etc/ for my configuration any day

Your build looks good (setting the ongoing intel issues that somebody else already mentioned aside), but personally I’d consider a different drive than the Samsung - it’s a great drive, but usually overpriced imo. If you can get it for a good price then absolutely go for it, but most times I find sn850x drives significantly cheaper and insignificantly slower. Otherwise, the only other note I’d make is that grub is abysmally slow at higher resolutions on chips with no igpu, at least when using a nvidia gpu. I’m not certain if this would apply to an AMD gpu, and either way you can just use something better (cough cough refind) to avoid the problem, but for anyone who just wants the default out-of-the-box bootloader on most distros to just work properly it might be worth spending the extra ~$40 for the K series instead of the KF to get the igpu. It’s not something I’d recommend doing personally, but it’s at least worthwhile to know about when you’re making the K/KF choice imo. Anyway, good luck with your build and have fun with setting everything up!

In Canada we have Kijiji, which is… not perfect for privacy, but at least it’s not facebook

You can also just hold power + volume up while it’s locked, once you feel the buzz it won’t accept biometrics until you put in the password.

I did a search for nvidia on my system and got these, which OP might wanna check for too:

egl-wayland
lib32-nvidia-utils
libvdpau
libxnvctrl
nvidia-open
nvidia-settings
nvidia-utils
opencl-nvidia 

I’ve installed extra packages for proton and machine learning, so some of these may not be there, but hopefully that helps.

Well your /efi entry looks right to me - maybe try mount -a (maybe capital A, going off memory here but whichever option is all) and watch for error messages or check dmesg?

sdb looks like the bootable USB to me - /dev/sda1 should be the system’s EFI, no? OP, could you try mounting that one (shouldn’t be encrypted afaik) and/or post the output of cat /etc/fstab? Edit: just realized you were unable to mount the encrypted drive in the first place so /etc is inaccessible, sorry