As A long time Linux user I couldn’t agree more. My son, who likes to game with me, was handing down his ‘old’ nvidia cards such as a 3070, so I put up with years of nvidia’s crap. A couple of months ago I ripped out his ‘old’ 3070 and put in a new XFX brand AMD RX 7600. Works out of the box and plenty fast for HD resolutions. Why did I waste years of my life fighting with nvidia nonsense on Linux??

• jmp.chat is Trumpistan or Canada phone numbers only afaik.

At the age of 67, having tried and used everything, not just booted a vm, but honestly used, I found Arch a much higher maintenance burden. System borking changes are definitely a thing - see the “needs manual intervention” messages that happen often. I know Arch users seem to revel in this and gloss over it. Thats fine for them but I no longer get any sense of personal empowerment from tedious obsessive hand holding of any operating system. To me it’s just unnecessary distracting extra work.

I’m always interested in Micheal’s comparisons but rarely see anything more than an illustration of newer libraries etc showing natural improvements. The trade off of Arch distros is the increased workload of managing a constant change & inevitable instability. Arch devs are notoriously for kicking out capricious system borking changes and the Pacman package manager is rather weak at dealing with cumulative changes. 2% or 3 % potential ephemeral improvements in speed vs hovering over the cli ‘fixing’ things seems a poor bargain to me.

Completely ceding software development to automation. Repeat across all fields of knowledge.

As data centers recycle and churn through past human input this will be the death of human progress.

I’ve recently spent a lot of time doing bare metal installs of a large number of non-systemd operating systems.

GhostBSD - Its BSD, so its stable and avoids the problems of Linux but supports less hardware especially 3D GPU’s.

FreeBSD - as above but more effort to install & configure initially because its server oriented but makes a fine workstation nevertheless.

Alpine - Highly performant Linux oriented to container hosting but can be made into a workstation with effort. Forget using nvidia except in nouveau driver.

Void - highly performant. more packages than Alpine. can be made into a workstation with effort. Forget using anything but newest nvidia GPU’s and even then strange unsolvable glitches.

Artix - look this is Arch with a non-systemd init (your choice of 3). Being Arch it inherits the repo’s of bleeding edge packages but also inherits the heavy maintenance burden of Arch (if you know, you know). I’m just too bloody busy to baby sit an Arch install with all its nonsense.

Endeavour et al - wait for other OS’s to implement work arounds to systemd’s cancerous kowtowing to corporate America imposed surveillance laws.

Devuan - a drop in replacement for Debian. Inherits Debian’s stability and ease of maintenance but with proven mature implementation of OpenRC init system.

The is the one I use for a calm happy life. To save time you can get a distro called ‘Vendefoul Wolf Linux’ which is Spanish in origin. Its a spin of Devuan but with a choice of GUI desktops and a GUI Calamares installer (the Devuan text mode TUI installer is fine, but whatever).

My daily driver is Vendefoul Wolf (Spanish for ‘vengenance’) LxQT desktop. Light, fast simple, stable. tip: download the ‘weekly’ iso’s not the old 2025 ones.