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Comment by flomo | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, it took me way too long to figure the Arch etc crowd are hobbyists who enjoy having something which always 'needs maintenance' over the weekend. (And maybe they don't want to admit they are hobbyists because what they are doing seems Very Important.)

Sorta like 'car guys' who recommend some old thing you can wrench on.

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For what it is worth, while I'm sure it is right on target for some, I think that's incorrect model of a mean arch user. Updates are once a month thing for me (and the maintenance for that rarely exceeds 10m if that). I barely do any distro level tinkering, after all, I need to spare some time to improve my emacs config ;).

Basically, my model of a mean arch user would be closer to a DIYer -- likes to follow clear manual instructions, likes sturdy and non-ephemeral things, likes to know what the sausage is made of, but prefers if maintenance costs are minimized (since they will be bearing those costs and are responsible for the thing), so makes choices according to that.

Hey, your response improves my opinion of 'car guys'. Because the analogy is thin and they are looking directly at what is coming out of the 'sausage machine'. And if the result is good, they could sell the machine for profits! (Unlike computer nerds.)

I'm sticking with "hobbyists/dabblers" here, because almost nobody runs Arch in real production scenarios. Its just a fun high-touch thing people can enjoy fucking around with. Nothing wrong with that.

(That is why someone could trivially trojan hundreds of packages and it's NBD. Because "Nobody Cares." Wipe it and start over, funguy.)

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