emacs

On my own system, but usually for remote work I use Vim as it’s easier to make usable

A good password manager encrypts your passwords with your own master password (and if you don’t trust them, use an open source one like Bitwarden)—so, even if it gets hacked, your passwords are not immediately compromised. You should take even more measures, like using 2FA such as your phone or a physical key, which basically makes you invincible. Way better than remembering passwords.

About that last point, you don’t really need to. Internet people like to show off their customized desktops and systems, but in reality using a “just works” distribution requires very little headache and time. Except for the time spent choosing it, that is

I’ve never tried NixOS, but it looks really promising.

I usually use Fedora or OpenSUSE, which have good software availability (unfortunately not as good as the AUR). Fedora provides selinux by default, and has profiles for basically everything. SUSE uses AppArmor, but Arch doesn’t provide convenient configuration for either, and only supports x86_64 (which is why I switched away from it).

People have different opinions on how packages should be managed. Of course, there are some package managers which are very similar to each other (DNF and zypper have the same backend), but they can also get really different (Nix/Guix and pacman are basically completely opposite in philosophy). It comes down to preference, and you can’t force anything.