I find this a very reasonable take.

I'll add - I think the complexity is somewhat "over-stated" for Arch at this point. There was absolutely a period where just reading the entire install guide (much less actually completing it) was enough to turn a large number of even fairly technical people off the distro. Archinstall removed a lot of that headache.

And once it's up, it's generally just fine. I moved both my spouse and my children to Arch instead of Windows 11, and they don't seem particularly bothered. They install most of their own software using flatpaks through the store GUI in Gnome, or through Steam, the browser does most of the heavy lifting these days anyways.

I basically just grab their machine and run `pacman -Syu` on it once in a while, and help install something more complicated once in a blue moon.

Still requires someone who doesn't mind dropping into a terminal, but it's definitely not what I'd consider "all that challenging".

Again, I like Debian a lot as a distro (much more than Ubuntu), but it's just not the same as a distro like Arch, even when you're on testing. Sid is close, but between Arch and sid... I've actually found fewer issues on Arch, and since there's an existing expectation that the community maintains and documents much of the software in AUR, there's almost always someone actually paying attention and updating things, rather than only getting around to it later.

It's not that Debian is a bad release, but it's the difference in a game on steam being completely unavailable for a few hours (Arch) or 10 days (Debian testing) due to an upstream issue.

I swapped a while back, mostly because I kept hitting issues that are accurately described and resolved by steps coming from Arch's community, even on distros like Debian and Fedora.

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The power in debian is still that Ubuntu has made it very popular for folks doing commercial/closed source releases to provide a .deb by default. Won't always work... but at least they're targeting your distro (or almost always, ubuntu, but usually close enough).

Same for Fedora with the Redhat enterprise connections.

But I've generally found that the community in Arch is doing a better job at actually dogfooding, testing, and fixing the commercial software than most of the companies that release it... which is sad, but reality.

Arch has plenty of its own issues, but "Stale software" isn't the one to challenge it on. Much better giving it a pass due to arch/platform support limitations, security or stability needs, etc... All those are entirely valid critiques, and reasonable drivers for sticking to something like Debian.

No Debian is stable as in “it shall not change”.

There are times where there are known bugs in Debian which are purposely not fixed but instead documented and worked around. That’s part of the stability promise. The behaviour shall not change which sometimes includes “bug as a feature”

I'm using Debian testing in my daily driving desktop(s) for the last, checks notes, 20 years now?

Servers and headless boxes use stable and all machines are updated regularly. Most importantly, stable to stable (i.e. 12 to 13) upgrades takes around 5 minutes incl. final reboot.

I reinstalled Debian once. I had to migrate my system to 64 bit, and there was no clear way to move from 32 to 64 bit at that time. Well, once in 20 years is not bad, if you ask me.