I wash with plain water and a little bit of citric acid or vinegar.
Keep (unused) silica gel kitty litter in a mesh bag in your fridge to lower the relative humidity, I lived in a swamp for a while too :/
Edit: dry your silica gel in the oven every couple weeks, once it looks like it’s losing its transparency.
So, the big thing with instability is that with Linux “Unstable” refers to “Constantly receiving updates” rather than “Breaks all the time”
In my experience, if arch breaks, 99% of the time YOU the user did it.
If you want a kinkless experience with it, keep it simple.
Arch ships with systemd, as such, it also ships with systemd-boot. Use what’s built, don’t add additional bootloaders unless you need the functionality they offer.
Gnome, Matlab, and VScode have wiki pages for installation and configuration, and Firefox is in the repos and is one line in the terminal to install (#pacman -S firefox)
For a first install, I’d recommend following the wiki to install instead of using archinstall to familiarize yourself with how to use and read the wiki.