This is why I’m going to argue for pure Arch or Artix. Ultimately, what a lot of these distros bring to the table is artwork. But they bite off a lot more than artwork when doing so. And in time they can start to such at that administration.

It’s not very hard to set up your system with a vanilla DE and adjust it into something good. You don’t need to get fancy. And to the extent someone else’s art work can be good and accelerate getting to a nice system, there are other ways to distribute that.

You should want your distro to be 95% administration and 5% art because in the long run that’s whats going to keep your system stable and avoid future headaches. But some artists are overly ambitious and envision creating an entire version of an operating system, including the parts they aren’t passionate about. And some people buy in on this premise and install these projects. …instead of just releasing dot files.

For it to go well requires that both the leadership and the contributors are passionate about all of the parts and passionate about them forever. Not very likely. If you want a distro that is administered well get a distro where administration is all they do, and then get your art work as a separate selection.

I think the one flaw in that is if someone say, “uh, I’m not sure.” That’s a way of saying no to tea, and you shouldn’t make them tea. In other words, even that makes it way fuzzier than it should be.

For Israel.

A related thing I’ve done is I’ve made it so pacman can’t run outside of Tmux. One of the reasons is I got so fed up with Ubuntu server that I decided I’d experiment with a few servers being Arch. Some might consider that crazy but it’s what experiments are for.

I can’t afford to have an ssh disconnect break a system and forcing Tmux prevents me from doing something lazy. Side benefit… it also means it’s easier to not babysit it.