Screen is black on boot with different desktop elements loading in slowly

Hello,
I am a very very new Linux user (as in I installed it this afternoon) and I was having some issues when booting. I also had a few questions that I had and was hoping could be answered here. My issue with booting is that, as the title states, when I load into EndeavourOS, it shows me a screen where it initializes everything and yada yada, which takes a long time to finish. Afterwards, it allows me to log in with no problem. Once I log in, however, I am greeted with a black screen with just my cursor, and have to wait another ~30s for the rest of my visual elements to load in. If anyone has any fixes for this, please let me know, as it is very frustrating. I used nvidia-inst to get my nvidia drivers, but that was no help with the issue. I will attach an image of my neofetch for anyone who may need that information.

Some questions I had were:
What packages do you recommend to have for students?
What are some beginner mistakes to avoid?
How do I customize the visuals of EndeavourOS?

Thank you to anyone who uses their free time to help me out!
Isaiah :slight_smile:
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