Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

In general the more something is marketed to musicians, the more it is likely to have a slight bias designed to flatter the source material, and your tastes may vary depending on what sort of music you like, eg British stuff tends to have a gentle double EQ peak, American stuff tends to be a little more punchy in the midrange, Japanese stuff slightly more flat, Swedish and German stuff has a sound of its own, and so on. These are very slight biases, and maybe they're what 'sounds good' to engineers based on linguistic and musical differences.

Stuff marketed to film/broadcast tends to emphasize accuracy and fidelity (in the marketing materials anyway...). These days anything other than bargain basement is neutral and clean enough for that sort of work. Although I owned much more bulky and expensive gear, I've done several feature films with a small portable recorder by Zoom that costs only a few hundred dollars. It sounds great, because I plug great microphones into and use great headphones to monitor (and know how to listen!), plus I work hard to control the dynamics and you generally don't need the same sort of dynamic flexibility for film work that you need for musical performance.

If I was recording music I'd say the same recorder is just adequate because for musical purposes you want some nice color and pleasing dynamics. If you're lookinga t several options in the same price bracket and not really sure which to go for, play around with the external controls. The quality feel of the front panel, knobs, and buttons/switches is a reflection of the internal engineering quality. If you like the physical feel of one unit over another, you'll probably have the same experience with the audio path and the software stack, if it's digital.

I am also not afiliated in any way with Fifine but I was really impressed by the build quality of the mic.

I am also on Fedora and on the journey of improving audio I also have been playing around with Pulseeffects. Playing around with gate, compressor and limiter, etc. can certainly improve even more (and cut off some noise, etc.) but I am still figuring things out:

https://fedoramagazine.org/tune-up-your-sound-with-pulseeffe...

Historically, audio routing is something you do within a DAW, between tracks and plugins and the like - and routing sound between separate apps is a niche OS feature based on hacks and workarounds (like VAC) instead of the OS providing primitives that map to the concept model. In an outboard setup you could at least trace the cables to see what's connected to what... and that's what audio routing on any OS lacks (JACK patchbays notwithstanding, since JACK is a pain to run alongside normal PulseAudio).

If I remember correctly, it was non-obvious how to set up monitoring with Live and VAC, so I ended up using ASIO4ALL which can bridge multiple soundcards - but prevents other programs besides your DAW from using them. You're right, audio routing on Windows is a bit of a mess, MacOS is plug and play with strings attached, and on Linux there's JACK which has potential for greatness but is somewhat underdeveloped. Same as any desktop feature on these OSes :)

The kit also comes with a little tri-pod to mount the mic. So instead of having the mic hang in front of you face/camera, you can put it between your hands in front of you, the same way you can put a cup of coffee between your hands/arms while typing. Then just speak downwards toward the mic instead of stretching your neck towards the mic on the arm and looking like a podcaster/streamer.

You also don't really need the extra pop filter in the kit - the mic sock works fine enough on its own.

Then I'd recommend using a recording app (pulsecaster on fedora) and record yourself! Listen to what the mic does to your voice at different volumes (always leave the pulseaudio volume at 85%, use the knob on the mic).

If you want to loop you own voice back through your headphones (and typing noises), run the following command:

pacmd load-module module-loopback latency_msec=5

and to unload it: pacmd unload-module module-loopback

Sometimes I would just sit alone (not in a meeting), without any music and just listen to my typing while I code (looping the mic back into the headphones). Feels like you are sitting underneath the keys! It's soothing in a way.