At least in macos the key you’re thinking of is called command, not meta. The history of the key names is that originally the space cadet keyboard had 4 modifier keys, control, meta, super, and hyper. When emacs was originally written it was aimed at this keyboard with those modifers. When using a PC keyboard emacs often mapped meta to alt and nothing for super until the windows key was introduced by Microsoft which made it a natural option for super and so the hyper key is the only one that totally died off.

Man, it sure is confusing that apparently some software calls the super key meta. Historically that’s alt and a lot of software calls alt meta instead. My brain was bending over backwards reading this article, confused as to why alt and meta were being used simultaneously as though separate until I figured it out.

EDIT: lol, I just noticed apparently the KDE key remapper used meta in place of alt so we’ve got both uses of meta in the same article and the author went with the keyd definition…

As others have said I wouldn’t recommend testing as it doesn’t get security updates, however I personally run sid (unstable) and have for a long time now. At least since 2020 if I recall, it does occasionally break, albeit anecdotally less than my friends arch system, can’t comment on if that’s the distro or just our individual setups. The main reason I run it is because I like debian, I’m very familiar with apt, with its initramfs tools, with all of the debianisms but I wanted something rolling. I tried arch but it just wasn’t as comfy for me personally. That being said it is a bit like hard mode, there is no arch wiki, if you don’t do heavy customization that might be ok, sometimes I’ve wanted to tweak my initramfs and while I know the debian generator better than arch, there’s far less easily accessible documentation on it. In general it’s been such a good experience that I basically stopped distro hopping, it’s been my home now for a long time but I know I’m in the minority with that so take it as you will.

Glad you got it working. It’s not exactly the most straight forward setup unless you use virt manager a lot.

Virt manager does but only during creation. You have to check the option for “customize VM before creation” or whatever that option is on the last screen. Then there’s a firmware drop down where you can select OVMF

I don’t believe pika supports booting from a BIOS as almost no real systems have a BIOS anymore, especially not the target systems pika is designed for. You likely need to switch to UEFI firmware in qemu, possibly installing the ovmf package if you don’t already have it and then switching to that firmware in whatever VM manager you’re running