I’m still baffled by it, but a couple of years ago I found a switch in my brain and now I rarely have issues falling asleep anymore. I think the most important thing for me is not to constantly ask myself why I’m failing at such a seemingly simple task, but rather work around my natural instincts and try to support them as best I can.

If I go to bed early, because I have to get up early, I start spiralling and fall asleep way later, so I try to only go to bed whenever I’m tired. If I end up sleping too little I take one or two 20 minute naps (I try to never exceed 20, it would make me even more tired).

Another factor is probably how long I sleep. I always assumed I wanted to sleep long, because getting up sucks. But at some point I realised, that my first ‘sorta-awake’ moment is the perfect moment to get up and have energy for the day and get tired at the proper time. This moment comes at around 6 hours for me. I still struggle with this a lot though.

Horses were tiny back then

This should be possible to build with sway (and presumably any other tiling wm). Now that I’m thinking about it, you can probably also do this with gnome and a couple of extensions.

The status bar can be achieved with waybar in sway, which can be easily configured the way you described. In gnome there is an extension to rearrange the top panel.

I’m thinking of opening each window in a new workspace, can be configured for sway and gnome has an extension for that.

For the tabs we can use waybar with sworkstyle for each wroskpace, requires some configuration. For gnome I’d just use one of the many task bar extensions.

I can’t immediately think of a solution for the searchable list, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t exist for both systems.

I realised like a year ago that I get up better if I set an alarm for a 7 hour sleep. I usually wake up before the alarm somehow and if I manage to get up, I won’t feel tired the entire day. Did that for a year, then I just forgot and for an entire month I was irritated why my sleep sucked so bad…