intrepid

Arch requires significantly more tinkering to keep it working, compared to Debian. That's not because of FUD. Arch has a more hands-on philosophy. It even says so on their wiki.

I have seen savvy users jump directly from Windows to Arch without trying easier distros like Mint. But if given a choice, I wouldn't introduce anyone to Arch as their first distro. Most people are simply not that patient and are likely to give it up as being too hard. They are likely to give in to the actual FUD that Linux is not user-friendly.

It's not unusual for people who have tasted the freedom that Arch gives you, to think that it's the easiest distro around. But the Arch way of doing things is alien to most people around. It's very important to set the expectations straight and not get carried away.

That really isn't true. Debian packages are often heavily patched and tested to make sure it fits into the rest of the ecosystem. While Arch does it too, they prefer to keep the packages as vanilla as possible - often requiring effort of the user's side to make it work with the rest of the system. It's a different philosophy. While Debian tries to be simple by being opinionated, Arch relies heavily on the effort of the users.

Let me start with my unbiased opinion. There's something for everybody in the Linux land. You have to try different distros out and settle with the one you like most. I usually advocate for the path of least resistance - ie, to start with the easiest distro. Mint is a good first distro. Fedora and Debian are also reasonable choices. But I have also seen a rare few cases where people start directly with a high effort distro like Arch - so it's not impossible.

For a lot of people, Mint may satisfy their needs - a user friendly distro that needs no tinkering and meets all of their needs. Some people though, like to tune everything. Such people can eventually grow into something like Arch.

I personally like Gentoo. Not because it's compiled from source, but because it's easy to work with its Portage package management system. Another one worth trying out is QubesOS, if you're into security.

If customizability is your concern, then Arch might be a better fit. Arch is almost as customizable, without the build step. The recent Gentoo binary repo is also equivalent.

I use Gentoo too. But it's for another reason.

If you mean the manual installation process, you can use debootstrap in the step where you use pacstrap for arch.

Isolation is easy to achieve. Flatpak's sandboxing layer is bubblewrap. It's an independent software. It wouldn't be too hard to write a wrapper for bubblewrap that acts like flatpak and launches applications in a carefully constructed sandbox.

Flatpak itself is a layer of software. You could do that for regular apps too - to take away the hassle of having to manually set it up for each app. I already have two software that implements that logic in parts.

Flatpaks aren't the cause of the fact that different applications don't function correctly with different versions of libraries

This problem has been solved by Nix and Guix. Nix is as popular among developers as flatpak is. Add bubblewrap to all applications, and you get nearly all the features as flatpaks. Flatpaks, meanwhile are huge and a bit slow to start - problems that Nix and Guix don't suffer from.

I do use flatpaks extensively. But they are probably not the best solution to the problems you mention.>

I don't like the wordings and insinuations in the article. Ubuntu Linux 'snuck' into Dell laptops? Dell - best known for good-quality mass-produced PCs - end up building Linux laptops? What are they saying? Linux is low quality and it being in Dell laptops is bad?

Dell and Canonical have a partnership. And Linux isn't a choice that's forced on consumers. That's hardly what one can say about Windows. An ad-ridden spyware that's disguised as an OS and forced down everyone's throat even when we don't want it. (Not dell, but there are cases where I had to buy a laptop and clean out Windows).

I don't understand the author's exact intentions (I read the entire article). Seems like they are trying to say something positive. But the choice of words is bad.

That usually isn't a problem as long as they keep it to themselves and away from the community. There are many Foss developers who are like that - they don't cause a controversy. This one seems to be different and openly toxic.

I don't remember exactly who, but there was one game developer who was all praises for that 1%. The Linux users were the most prolific testers who sent back detailed bug reports with ways to recreate the bug, logs and often core dumps even. That 1% helped the devs, as well as the other 99%.