Could be worth splitting your questions across posts, but given its here now, ill have a crack at the first few questions.

Arch wiki is pretty good, if you need more help, ask here or somewhere similar?

Your desktop environment settings are stored in your home directory, as long as you dont delete them, it should reinstall just fine.

Having home on a separate partition is safe, and a fairly good idea, it lets you wipe your root and reinstall without losing your home data. You can move your home off the root by creating the partition, mounting it somewhere temporarily, copying all files across, and them set it to mount to /home in fstab.

Rust works on windows, so exes are definitely possible. And i think you can cross compile for windows if you want/need to.

Dunno what you mean about crazy, do you mean complexity wise? I have found that rust is really painful to get started, but eventually it’ll click, and it starts to make sense.

Git and cargo are two different things, i think its currently recomended that you dont commit the cargo.lock file. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43667176/what-files-in-a-cargo-project-should-be-in-my-gitignore

Cant think of anything specific for your windows question, try it and ask questions when you get stuck?

I would consider asking questions in more general communities, this one is a little specific, so you may not be seen by the people who can help you.

For 2:

• Yes, and it doesn’t cheat by bundling some huge scripting runtime like some other languages do. It produces real, native code which will run almost as fast as an equivalent program in C (sometimes a little faster!)
• It gets as crazy as you make it, but the design of the language tries to help you keep things manageable.
• When you run cargo new or cargo init it should initialize a local git repo for you, just add a remote and push. If you’re setting it up on your own, add the target directory to .gitignore.

Also, for point 1.2: As long as you don’t delete your settings or change them in another program, they should stay where they are even if the DE using them is gone. However, if you aren’t short on disk space, there’s no need to get rid of a DE you aren’t using, since you can pick from all of the installed desktops in your display manager (the screen where you log in for the first time after booting).

Looks like most everything has been answered, but I’ll note that if you struggle with arch, endeavor os has the same underpinnings while being a fair bit more beginner friendly (graphical installation, easy drivers, utilities to rank mirrors and update your packages, etc.). Arch wiki is great for questions that have already been answered, endeavor forums are useful for asking questions when the wiki falls through.

Lmao. Try the commhnities Linux, ArchLinux, or UnixSocks. Lemmy isn’t really the elitist arch community everybody here is sweet. Can even try stackoverflow 😂

I don’t have a lot of info since I’m new to desktop linux, but you can run portable Linux on a Live Disk (an .ISO file on a USB drive) and this is a way to try Linux without having to install it. Also making sure you’re aware of the tools balena etcher, and ventoy.

By safe if you mean you can do this on a drive with important files on it, I so wouldn’t. With arch linux it’s better to be ready for it to break, because if it does you often do not have to start from scratch again, there’s usually a step you can take to fix it.