I always find it funny when people do that with Windows, Mac, and Linux. It completely misses the fact that Linux can be all of these things.
OS for kids: https://www.sugarlabs.org/
Just works: https://www.linuxmint.com/
Fuck around and find out: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
On WAN show last week, Luke mentioned he’s daily’ing Linux on his work laptop. In the past, he has used Mint because “it just works” but always had problems so he would give up.
He expected to try Mint again, but decided to go nuclear and try Arch. For him, Arch just worked.
Just goes to show that different distros can mean different things to different people.
That’s also been my experience on multiple systems. But one thing that’s seemingly inevitable for me with Arch, things will eventually become flaky and I cannot solve it without a reinstall.
For instance, when I first got my RX 9070XT on a 3 year old arch install, it worked great. Then Cyberpunk would crash the graphics driver, but only during the benchmark or moving around. 3 months later there was no change. Bought a new PSU cuz I was running one 100w under spec (PowerSpec 650w bronze… bought a Corsair RM1000x) and nope.
I eventually got fed up and decided to go the immutable route. Works great again.
I have not had to really mess with CachyOS for over a year, while “stable” distros were a nightmare for me.
…Yeah it just depends what you’re trying to get your system to do. Arch can range from incredibly hazardous to “it just works” depending on the person and thing, and so can Mint. I think most distros should be viewed that way.