Ice is more dense than oil, so it sinks to the bottom of the fryer. There it turns into liquid water anathema immediately into steam. This steam needs at least 1000 times more space than the ice cube (1700 times more than water under normal pressure) and blows all the oil out of the fryer. I would expect quite a fountain. In a science fair experiment 10ml of water in a cup of hot oil gave a considerable fireball and a splash zone of about 1.5m. Dropping in a piece of dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) just made a little bit of a fizzle.

If you used pandoc hen you were programming your thesis. ;-)

It depends on what you want to achieve.

Vi and it’s descendants are brilliant editors for a programmer but not for writing prose. So stay away from them. ;-)

Do you want just to write text without being distracted by an overwhelming gui or are you fine with the hint at options?

Do you want to write in a terminal?

How much do you want to format while typing? By typing the format commands into the text or by clicking on buttons or ctrl-key magic?

Do you need version control?

For each of your combination of answers there are different solutions.

I used testing for ages, it is really stable. Only the phase after a feature freeze for the release of a stable version can be a bit shaky. For some weeks I just change my repos to the stable version.

That is standard in all of Debian, just get it as a flatpack.

Same story, same tips, but I started with SuSE Linux 4.3 in 1996. Just try stuff, read the error messages, read docs and ask. A lot of peaople who know stuff are happy to help out of altruism or the chance to show off. ;-)