This better not awaken anything in me…

Honestly, with Flatpak and immutable base systems this is a place Linux is really excelling now too. Being able to show a novice user a shared package manager with a search and a bunch of common apps and them actually install/remove them in a safe manner with a high likelihood they’ll work out of the box (since they come with all their deps in sync independent from distro) is kinda huge.

For kernel dev it would be a disaster, there’s too much implicit action, and abstractions that have unknown runtime cost. The classic answer is that everyone uses 10% of its features over C, but nobody can agree on which 10%.

As someone forced to get up to date with C++ recently, at this point it’s a language in full identity crisis. It wants so badly to be Rust, but it’s got decades of baggage it’s dragging along.

In a world where Valve controls 90% of what is running on a device with immutable / containerized images, yeah I think Arch makes a lot more sense. A distro focused on rolling release is a lot less likely to hang you up when you choose to update.

Debian is great, but depending on where you are in the release cycle it can be a pain in the ass to stay up to date and, frankly, the last time I ran it, shit like apt/dpkg configuration and so many /etc files and structures just felt like mis-features or too complex for their own good.

That’s an interesting thought. I’ve wondered this about Chrome’s market share in browsers too. How much of it is just that so much traffic is now from phones where, even if you have another browser installed, apps open links in embedded Chrome web views.