Yeah, I get that. I do, however, really like how FireDragon comes with a lot of the extension I'd like to use, and with searx as the default web search. It also takes almost no time to switch to a much better KDE layout as opposed to the seemingly script kiddie dr4a6onized default.
I wouldn’t use firedragon. It is a very outdated fork of librewolf, which is hardened even more. While librewolf is only a few days behind regular Firefox, firedragon sometimes is months behind making it a horrible choice for security.
Over the years of using Vim both professionally and for my own uses, I've learned to just install LunarVim and only add a handful of packages/overrides. Otherwise I just waste too much time tinkering and not doing the things I need to.
I usually keep most of the config. I just move them around to make it more comprehensive. The only time I made a huge change during a rewrite was when I learnt about treesitter textobjects.
If you actually try to understand what's happening, I think it's one of the best ways to learn how a system is composed, at least if you install manually. What's a partition, file system, what does mounting do, chroots, you name it.
I don't use Arch anymore but still think it's a great distro to learn the basics while still having the luxury of new binary packages. Manual Arch install abstracts basically nothing away from you, for better or for worse.
Currently on NixOS, I'd say while its engineering is better overall, the things you learn there are much more distribution-specific or maybe concept-specific and often not applicable to other distributions.
I guess there are also probably ways to install e.g. Debian manually, I've never seen instructions for it though as there was always the focus on the installer, and frankly I'm not a big fan of apt and all. It always seemed to be much more convoluted than pacman plus it does a lot of stuff for you, whether you want it or not was my impression.
I was once checking out Garuda, because the name popped up a handful of times. Outside of the absolutely repulsive front page, the moment i saw unmarked and unexplained “fun scripts” in the installer, i unplugged the installer
Very fair. I'm a far cry from an advanced user - I know just enough to be dangerous to myself, and didn't see that. As I said in another comment, though, I do like that the default browser is somewhat hardened and uses a decent searx instance as the default search. It does seem to be marketed towards teenagers, though, unfortunately.
It’s not even really about how advanced you are. Using something more trustworthy, and something you can depend on, is always better. For arch(-based) distributions, i would always recommend Endeavour. Plain Arch will just do it too, if you can follow instructions as listed
Arch is pretty stable and often more usable than something based on Debian from my experience fedoras better but has so many more bugs compared to arch. I chose arch because everything was broken on Debian and fedora based stuff. Leave me alone with your philosophy about "out dates software is stable software".
Not everyone uses a ten year old system and bugs in graphical software that exist when the new version of Debian drops exists for pretty much the whole releases lifecycle from my experience and that's painful.
Debian is literally one of the most stable systems out there. It only pails in comparison to RHEL and RHEL like systems but the stability difference isn't huge. Arch on the other hand you get updates daily and they create breaking changes.
No, it's a rolling release. Stable means that behaviours don't change during a support cycle of a major version. A rolling release can't be stable since it doesn't have major versions.
I installed arch last night in less than 20 minutes. The longest part was figuring out how to connect WiFi from the terminal. But I googled it and it was easy.
We all have different definitions of "working system". I call a first time boot into alpine linux (after installing docs and ditching busybox) or openbsd a fully working system.