Yes, but CachyOS might not be, and while it does a bit to make things substantially easier for your friend, you'll have a lot of familiarity with it as an Arch user.
Source: An Arch user for 15 years who just installed CachyOS when I wanted to switch from Cosmic to KDE.
In my experience, it's usually power users or basic users with very specific application requirements, who have trouble moving between operating systems. There's usually a FOSS alternative to those applications, but often requires reworking a workflow or upskilling more than they want to. But they're still basic users so it's more a speed bump than a road block.
So yeah, most people can switch to MacOS without an issue, and the vast majority of those can switch to a distro like Fedora or Ubuntu and quickly feel comfortable.
Power users get stuck in this situation where they've learned how to do advanced things in Windows, have things tweaked to support more complex and peculiar workflows, but often don't understand the actual concepts behind them. And even if they do understand the concepts, they still have to learn the alternatives in a new OS, and rebuild their workflows. Now, there's a lot more ability to learn behind the scenes about the why and how with Linux and BSD, so I'd argue they'd be better off to just suck it up and get started, and they'll be better off before long.
I'm with you. I've never really liked the look of QT, but I think I'm going to go for it anyway. It's always felt more plasticky and artificial, compared to GTK feeling more grounded and earthy. Plus, KDE has always felt cluttered in every way they can clutter it. So I was into the boxes (I was partial to fluxbox) and XFCE back in the day. Played with Gnome 3 a bit, had a cyclical love and ultimately hate relationship with it, but got hung up on Gnome as the best option when I wanted to switch to Wayland.
I've been using Cosmic since January, and I like it, but I'm left wanting more out of it. I was thinking of spinning my own environment with LabWC, but... meh. It's a lot of work, and I want something more integrated.
I've been using KDE in Asahi on my Macbook Air a bit, and I guess I could use it more. But I don't really use that machine a ton, either. Mostly for it's better speakers than my Thinkpad, and I have it connecting a VPN automatically until I can be bothered to switch from iwd/systemd to network manager on my primary.
God I wish Gnome would change it's tune, and stop being so militantly simplistic. The idea of extensions is great, but using a rolling release distro is rough when you're relying on a bunch of extensions to make your DE suitable. I really like their approach to UX at it's foundation. Cosmic is showing a lot of promise, and has that configurability built in, and I do look forward to where it goes. but it's going to have this problem where a lot of the software that looks best in it is libadwaita, which enforces drastically different UX.
Ah, now I remember why I bought the Macbook.
I guess my major issue is that unifying discussions shouldn't be behind closed doors, and it certainly shouldn't be around anything and everything one person or group of people says. Both of those things are dangerous, and it's partially in contrast to those dangerous forms of unity that Democrats seem so disjointed.
Another part of it is that the Republican party has been going off the rails for decades now, and that's brought the Democratic party further right as people jumped ship to it. With the party representing such a large spectrum, it's understandable that there's more diversity in opinion. Two parties are already not enough, but when you cram more of the political landscape into just the one, well, here we are. It makes it even harder to stand up to what caused it in the first place.
Though that still pales in comparison to the problems of money in politics and lack of term limits, and many other things I'd consider in different layers.
On the one hand, a totally unified party is clearly a problem. I don't particularly want the Democrats to be united on everything, we can see from the Republicans that is a recipe for authoritarianism.
On the other hand, it would be nice if they could fucking unite against authoritarianism.
Evolution being just a little bit clunky is a massive improvement from the Gnome 2 and early Gnome 3 days, for what it's worth.
Thanks, I'll have to sit my ass at my desk so I can try it again. I wonder if there's much delta between what you're using and the beta I'm on from Extra. Though it does look like there are some new betas in Extra-Testing.
I'll need to give tiling another try, I started using alpha 5 back in January and there were some pretty nasty bugs in tiling mode back then that made me think maybe a memory leak or something. After 15-20 minutes performance would get horrible until switching back to floating, though I'm fuzzy on the details.
Is there any capability to leave an open space? Honestly, I like tiling more for the orderliness above and beyond snapping than the dynamism. Aaaaaand that's reminding me why I was looking at building out a LabWC environment, it has configurable snap zones.
I started dabbling in around 2000, getting sick of the instability of Windows, and it seeming like the next logical step of geekdom.
I tried a LOT of distros. Mandrake, Connectiva, Red Hat to Fedora Core, Slackware, Debian Woody, Crux, etc etc. I drifted in a Debian-centric circle until I finally landed on Arch. Lost my way for a bit during my IT career, supporting Windows I ended up just using that. But I'm back to Arch now as my daily, Debian for some networking projects, and a bit of Fedora from time to time when I need to spin something up quick.
Not really for the purpose of this thread, since pretty much anything can do what OP is asking, but any idea how the Juno Tab compares to the Starlabs Starlite in regards to build quality, cooling, and what not? I noticed the other day that the Starlite has been updated with an N350 CPU. Though it is up to a $765 starting price...
Once or twice a year I start thinking it would be nice to have a tablet. Then within a month I wonder wtf I want a tablet for.
Is it still relying on Halium?
Edit: It seems it does use Halium
https://liliputing.com/flx1s-is-a-new-linux-phone-thats-mostly-a-downgrade-from-the-flx1/
I think I'll keep looking into importing a Jolla C2.
I was thinking the same with my 7840u. Could try something a bit more cutting edge than Mint, though I will admit I have no idea how up to date they keep the kernel these days. Though if they live boot, they're removing the SSD and likely qtile from the equation, so it's a bit tricky to isolate.