And suddenly, I can get the neck floof to look how I want. That's the part I struggled with and caused me to take the break in the first place. Taking a break remains the best way to get over hurdles for me
And I finally got VirtioFS to work, which means i can now share folders with my windows 11 VM without using SSHFS. The latter worked okay, but it was prone to crashing out of nowhere sometimes and that meant losing progress on the drawing i was working on.
The weirdest improvement is that my UPS is now integrated in GNOME, showing the battery status. Why wasn't it before? On my old setup I even had NUT installed and now I haven't.