yellow [she/her]

Use dd! It’s a tool that allows you to copy the contents of anything bit-for-bit to anywhere else. First, you’ll need to boot into a live USB of any distro. Then, after plugging in both drives, you’ll want to run something like dd if=/path/to/source/drive of=/path/to/output/drive bs=4M. You can get the paths of each drive by running lsblk, and they’ll look something like /dev/sda1 or /dev/nvme0n1. (Be very careful with dd, as whatever you put as the output drive will be irreversibly overwritten with whatever you put the input drive as.)

Honestly, for any semi-modern hardware, the different amount of “bloat” between any two distros is small enough to be irrelevent for most everything you would do on a computer up to and including gaming, especially compared against Windows. Yes, Arch may be less bloated than, say, Ubuntu, but are you really going to notice or care that your system is idling at 1.2 GB of RAM usage instead of 800 MB?

Just connect USB-C headphones

Not everyone happens to have a pair lying around, and this doesn’t really work for IEMs and the like.

or use a USB-C to 3.5mm audio dongle.

I’ve yet to find a dongle that lasts more than around half a year of frequent use before starting to break. If you have any recommendations, that would be greatly appreciated.