Your issues with xfce-notifyd don’t make a lot of sense. Therefore, I wouldn’t dismiss the thought that you might have tarnished your GNOME Wayland session.
Yeah, based on another reply in this thread, I seem to have botched things. I've already started ensuring I have the proper backups in place for reformatting my boot drive.
Perhaps consider Fedora this time
I certainly will. Thanks for the recommendation. This distro seemed to be the one most often recommended while I was looking around just now. I will also be looking into extensions as well.
Sway and Hyprland
Window managers have piqued my interest in the past. Currently, I think I'll focus on GNOME, but I agree with looking into these one at a time if GNOME ends up not suiting my needs.
the skills required are linearly correlated with the complexity of the system
That's good to know, I really agree with Arch's philosophy of focusing on simplicity. I don't have much experience with containers, tbh. However, I'm not opposed to learning about them. That said, I have done a little bit of reading regarding them in the past, and why they might be useful.
Question: Is there any reason why you seem to gravitate towards rolling release distros?
WRT Arch: it grabbed my interest because having the option for the most current updates sounded appealing. It may not be necessary, but if the situation arises and it would help, I'd like to have it. The Arch wiki has also been a big incentive, as well as the AUR. If I'm not mistaken, Arch is also a distro that allows me to pick and choose aspects of my operating system with intention as opposed to having a system that comes with stuff that I don't use or need.
WRT TW: As Arch grabbed my interest initially, I was worried about whether it may cause too many issues down the line. So, I read that BTRFS was useful for snapshotting and preventing accidents, while still enjoying the benefits of a rolling release distro. I suppose it comes down to having the option to choose from more current software updates, while having the security of native BTRFS support and snapshots. I was also looking at TW because it was a distro that supported KDE, but I'm learning from this thread that KDE is not ideal if I'm looking for a Wayland session.
‘Skill-ceiling’ is (surprisingly enough) grossly the same on Linux Mint and Arch, it’s the ‘skill-floor’ in which there’s a (significant) discrepancy between the two.