the Arch wiki has some info. Not too sure but i think enabling the systemd timer is enough.

Why not? Sounds are a subtle and quick indicator that something went good or bad. And if you find a particular action too repeating you can turn that sound off.

Plain Matrix rooms are a bit too foreign to Discord users i’d say.

There’s another alternative being built which resembles Discord a lot more, is federated and as i understand is built around Matrix communities: https://github.com/commune-os/commune-server

Here’s a demo instance: https://shpong.com/