THANK YOU!

Yes. I agree. It's also much more stable so you don't spend time troubleshooting. And there's tons of support and even 3rd party packages available for peripherals and hardware.

That's what I personally recommend.

That's pretty sound.

I bet!

Absolutely 100%.

Not to mention it's in most of the solutions to every problem Arch users face.

This! 👆

Versatile, sure.

But Arch is anything but simple. The proof is the number of Arch spinoffs that were made to make it easier to install and use.

And any distro can be for competent Linux users. I mean, Linus Torvalds uses Fedora. I don't think theres a more competent user than him.

100%

But this is the problem. It's like if Microsoft provided Windows with Limewire as a solution to download software. There's bound to be people who are going to exploit it for malicious reasons, and there's bound to be idiots who are going to fall for it. Heck, there's the possibility that even someone who knows what they're doing might also get caught at some point.

It's dangerous and irresponsible.

No, it just happened to be my instance.

As a side note, for some reason, I can't see any comments inside any post on this community. That's why I have to reply though my lemmy.ca alternate account.

LOL not with Carney at the helm. He's practically selling them Canada wholesale.

I've been a Linux user for 26 years. I made distros for hardware manufacturers. I know very well the distinctions between the AUR and the regular Arch repos and the parallel with Debian's.

With Arch, the problem is that the AUR is available in the first place and is very easy to enable. People, especially new users, won't necessarily understand what they're getting into when enabling it and getting packages from there. A lot of the advice people get online suggest to get packages from AUR. So Arch users are bound to use it at some point.

And if you add to that the fact that the standard repo has bleeding edge package versions with minimal testing means that vulnerabilities can also get introduced. And it's happened before. This affected Arch, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora, but you know what distribution wasn't affected? Debian stable and Ubuntu LTS.

And on top of that, I'm not even going to mention how unstable it is and how even just making updates is risky on Arch. You have to be on your toes all the time and you can end up with a broken system at any time. For a main PC operating system, I find that absolutely unacceptable. At least Manjaro tried to improve on this.

Valve switching to Arch makes sense though. They moved to Arch because they wanted the most up to date software and drivers available with a faster release cycle. Then control what versions they push to their devices. They keep a tight control over what gets updated by curating their own repositories. So it's not purely Arch either. It's Arch-based. You can expect software to be a little older on Steam OS.

In any case. For me, Debian is the solution. I'm looking for stability and security. It has a huge repo with practically every software under the sun. There's tons of documentation and support and a huge community. For me the distribution works OOTB without any hitch. I just know that I won't spend time troubleshooting something on my time off. I already do a lot of this during work.

LOL! I'm not THAT old hahahahaha!

But that sounds about right. I work in IT and troubleshoot IT problems all day. The last thing I want to do is troubleshoot my PC when I get home. I just want an OS that works. Debian is the best in that regards.