I Did It – I Switched to FreeBSD
kozume.neocities.org
kozume.neocities.org
It's kinda the point of a rolling release distro like Arch. More mainstream distributions don't have this drawback. I've upgraded old Debian and Ubuntu (-based) systems through several versions, and while it's slow and it's a pain to see the process sequentially upgrade stuff to old versions, and then less old, etc and doing what looks like useless work, it didn't take entire days and it was not broken. This painful process is what makes this work, because it only takes tested upgrade paths instead of upgrading packages from a random version to another random version, for the whole system.
With a rolling distribution, you'd better update often, or you lose all the advantages of it and you are better off with a non-rolling distro built on a stable basis.
(If you are spending entire days fixing Linux desktop, you are probably better off reinstalling from scratch.)
openSUSE Tumbleweed is an interesting option with this respect: rolling release but with a stability and polish close to mainstream distributions and many more things in the main repositories. I've been running it since 2018, I trust it, and would expect less frequent updates to work fine.
> Python-unfriendliness (when it comes to desktop usage anyway) of the Debian family
What is this Python-unfriendliness of Debian about?
Anyway, I understand that the author sees issues with all the distributions they tried and that's the intent of these remarks. In any case, it is great to see people running BSD distributions on the desktop. The only reason I have never considered trying is the lack of hardware support for stuff I use. I'd be otherwise interested, and having more free OSes usable on the desktop can only strengthen the ecosystem (I'm happy with Linux though).
Is there anything else to add?