• I don’t particularly like Arch.

    I don’t actually have a problem with it in general or its users. Wiki is helpful for almost everyone, regardless of distro (except maybe Nix and some immutables, where some things can be a bit different).

    It’s actually a tremendously important distro, and it, Debian, and Gentoo are the distros I know that if they disappear, Linux is either dead or very close to it.

    Still, I find Arch to be… I don’t know. I think this is actually about to be a very unpopular opinion, but I don’t like Pacman at all, and that’s probably the source of my issues with it. Its syntax annoys me and I use the terminal for package management so I’d have to be using it all the time.

    I think maybe I’m just too used to APT. The same way Arch users find Pacman intuitive, that’s how I feel about APT. I can use DNF and Zypper fine, but I’ll still prefer APT to them as well. It just feels like “home”, if that makes sense. (Nala and aptitude are both nice frontends to it as well.)

    I also don’t like having to rely on AUR for third party packages. That actually goes for every distro. Do not like third party packages or repos. Sometimes it’s necessary, but I keep it to absolute minimum and find Debian has most of what I need. If not, Flatpak. If not Flatpak, source.

    Another reason is that I think I prefer regular releases to rolling. I can go rolling if I need to, but I like just having something that doesn’t surprise me with a shit ton of updates every day. Well, not surprise me as it’s expected, but too many can be quite overwhelming sometimes.

    Just personal preference, I guess. Nothing at all wrong with rolling, it’s fantastic for a lot of purposes, just not mine.

    • Absolutely understandable, personally I prefer the AUR since I don’t ever need to download and compile the source code anymore, since everything I need got an AUR package.

      I also had bad experiences with apt, mostly that their release are too slow/I get stuck on an old release (my raspberry pi’s python version is still 3.7, which caused problems since I was using a python 3.8 library). That’s probably on me for not knowing how to upgrade my release, but I switched to Arch before learning how to fix this

      For the pacman flags, I simply use yay, the AUR wrapper instead, yay do a full system upgrade, and yay python will show me a list of packages that have similar names to install. Still not as clear as apt, but at least there’s no weird flag letters to remember for most use cases