If you’re on Gnome, you can use Frog for step 1 then Dialect for step 2.

I use Rnote to write freely on a big whiteboard and Xournal++ for taking notes over PDFs of lectures.

Rnote has a much more modern and user-friendly interface while Xournal++ has more features and has been around for longer. I use both where I feel each excels.

Try giving this a try. I found it suggested in the Arch wiki to update the bios. It’s basically a bootable Windows environment from a USB. You can then try running your firmware updates through it. It worked to update my bios so I assume it should easily work with updating firmware for other devices.

I wrote my own: doti

I used stow for a while but realized it was lacking in some aspects, especially when trying to manage multiple dotfiles separately. For example, I wanted the dotfiles of each application to be contained in its subfolder and the flexibility to pick and choose the dotfiles of which application to place on different computers/phones.

I checked out chezmoi but thought it was overkill for my needs especially since I was a fan of how simple and straightforward my dotfiles layout was with stow was. So I decided to write my own dotfile manager, doti. It’s basically a wrapper/manager for using stow. First time I share it online.

Also here are my dotfiles to give you an idea of how the layout looks. (I transitioned from using Sway with the nord theme and many tui/cli apps to using Gnome and mostly gui apps about a year ago)