The two are not mutually exclusive

Cows cannot consent to insemination by humans. And yet that’s what the industry runs on (as well as taking their babies from them so we can have the milk instead, causing the poor mothers severe emotional distress). It’s messed up.

Helix is a terminal based text editor. It’s much like vim / neovim, but unlike those editors it’s good to go right out of the box, no configuration or plugins needed to make it work well.

Topgrade is one I haven’t used, but it looks like its intended purpose is to let you upgrade your apps with one command, even if you use multiple different package managers (I.e. if you were on Ubuntu, you could use it to upgrade your apt packages, at the same time as your snap packages, as well as flatpak, nix, and homebrew if you’ve added those.)

Possibly? Though I wouldn’t recommend it. I tried that with xfce once, and it technically worked, but tiling window manager and desktop environments tend to have different aims. A desktop environment like plasma will have everything bundled together and playing well as a whole, while a window manager like i3 will be barebones and expect you to pick out the pieces yourself. DE’s are much more beginner friendly, while WM’s are great if you want to get as much customization as possible. Which will better suit you depends on your needs.

Distro isn’t important for tiling, just the window manager. I’d start with i3 personally, it’s been around a long time, which means the documentation is fairly plentiful.

Oh snap, don’t mind if I do

Sadly not available on Linux, but Arc has the best tab management paradigm of any browser I’ve tried, by far. Pinned tabs with folders, workspaces, and home urls goes hard.

On the other end of the spectrum, I’m very fond of qtbrowser. If you want a keyboard centered workflow it’s hard to beat.