Compared to Ubuntu where I'd often have major issues in between releases, I don't think I could ever go back.

The biggest one seems to be something related to the package mirrors only partially updating, or updates of common dependencies not being atomically applied to all packages - something like that. If you do a pacman -Syu in the middle of the critical time period, the system will fail to work with some core libs (libc, libicu) not being compatible. Booting into a recovery session and doing pacman -Syu again fixes it. However, it's been years since I experienced this - maybe they've taken some steps to eliminate this failure mode?

The other big (but still rare) failure mode is bugs in the kernel. The fix is simple, keep linux-lts installed alongside the standard linux kernel, so you can always boot into lts from the bootloader if the regular kernel doesn't work.

User software can have bugs in newer releases, but they're usually minor - you'll still be able to get work done without much disruption. And that's not really an Arch issue. Unless the bug is reported & fixed very quickly, Ubuntu/Fedora are likely to also get the buggy versions, just later.

Aside from the first failure mode, the OS itself doesn't fail. I've had bad experiences with upgrading between major releases of distros like Ubuntu. They're bloated to begin with, and accumulate more cruft over time and major upgrades. Arch just works. Plus, there's lots of software in the official repos, and the AUR / package build system is also excellent - far superior to the whole PPA mess on Debian/Ubuntu, and the equivalent on Fedora.

And this is the thing people ignore when they say they have no issues with cutting edge (not necessarily rolling release, which can be stable) distributions. Note that I'm not egging on you, if you're happy with the way your system works and manages software updates there's nothing wrong with that.

The software that makes up the distribution is as critical as the distribution itself. When you use cutting edge software you roll along with the issues new software introduces as soon as they're introduced. This has a plethora of effects including temporary breakage, feature removal that gets later reconsidered, config files that no longer work (or do different things) from one day to the next, and similar things.

While stable distributions do eventually inherit the software anyway, they generally do so at a later patch release. They'll go from 2.3.6 to 2.3.7 while waiting for the newest 2.4.0 release to get itself together. When necessary, downstream patches are used to apply fixes from newer releases without directly upgrading to a whole new version. This makes for a much slower rate of change in general, and as such a much slower rate of breakage. One can work around a specific set of bugs, but when that set of bugs changes every other day, that's harder and more time consuming to deal with.

Personally I prefer this latter approach, mostly as it allows me to choose when things may break (i.e. when upgrading between releases). Gentoo is currently the distro that provides me this choice, allowing me to pick between stable and bleeding edge releases on a per-package basis, hold back updates without causing library linking issues, and allowing me to install packages without syncing the entire repository and upgrading everything. This allows me to set some time apart to upgrade my system and be able to deal with whatever broke this time.

My system's most recent breakage came in the form of adwaita-icon-theme removing all the remaining non-symbolic icons, causing some programs to now lack their icons.

On the other hand, I had way more instances of a broken system and broken packages (where synaptic/apt just refuses to install anything) on my work computer that has debian than I ever had with arch.

Most projects do testing before making a release of course, and for lots of software releases are very reliable. The kernel is an example of this, where Arch packages the most recent "stable" kernel rather than sticking to an LTS version. There is nothing "unstable" about this, in the sense of "unstable" meaning unreliable or buggy.

The key thing is that "stable" and "unstable" have practically nothing to do with the quality or reliability of the distro. Unstable only means that the packages may update in non-backwards compatible ways, so you need to be prepared to make changes to accommodate that. Normally it's something like updating a configuration file, or passing different flags to a command line program, or something along those lines. Maybe you run some sort of service that links to shared libraries on the system, you need to be prepared to relink to updated versions or not depend on system-wide versions at all.

So long as you make sure to keep up with changes, rolling release distros are exactly as reliable as upstream releases.

The other thing to note is that tracking releases may actually end up being more reliable, because you are constantly getting bug fixes and improvements!

I expect even greater things from Arch in the future with Valve's use of this distro on the Steam Deck.

Totally undeserved IME.

For me, Arch and Manjaro, both rolling, have always been more stable than Ubuntu has ever been. At this point, I've used all three for about an equal amount of time (~2 years). On Ubuntu, 4ish years ago, my DE and stuff crashed a LOT. Hardly ever happened on either Manjaro or Arch.

It makes some kind of sense: DE devs, for example, are banging away on the latest version of their software. They'll even ask you to upgrade your DE to the latest version to see if you can reproduce an issue you found on an older version for whatever your Ubuntu snapshot is using. Paradoxically, newer software seems to have less bugs.

Honestly the most useful thing about Arch is the documentation. The Arch Wiki is a fantastic resource for all sorts of common Linux utilities, worth a read even if you use a different distro.

It broke the whole system so I decided to just remove snaps as a whole.

I run Arch Linux daily since 2019 and the only problems I had that I can remember are setting up dual-GPU on laptops and dealing with dual boot issues - whenever my laptop had a BIOS update on Windows, my BIOS settings would be reverted to the default, so the F1-12 keys acted as fn keys by default (e.g. pressing F5 wouldn't refresh a web page), Windows overwrote the bootloader on my boot partition so I had to reinstall GRUB/systemd-boot every time this happened and it also changed the SATA mode for the laptop which made it impossible to locate the Linux partition on my HDD unless I switched it back to AHCI (default was Intel RST + Optane).

The other issue I recently had with Arch which I think it's more related to the software and not the distro itself is that occasionally my Latte Dock will crash, but that's about it.

So I switched to Ubuntu. And the wifi troubles continued. But the mouse troubles went away.

Perhaps I'd have a better time with a desktop.

That stable base I don’t have to worry about plus up to date apps is living the dream, as far as I’m concerned.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide

A few years ago I moved back from Ubuntu to Debian and couldn't be happier.

I really, really dislike systemd, but the other desktop is a manjaro setup. It was stable for a while, but now something with logind (which is somehow related to systemd) broke.

The one reason I switched to manjaro is that the machine is shared between kids and two parents, and I wanted to be able to switch accounts from the screensaver prompt. That routinely fails now.

I really wish there was a debuggable (so, not systemd) Linux distribution where things like account switching, zoom and steam worked. Manjaro is the closest thing I've found. I wish one of the *BSD's worked for that. (I genuinely like my OpenBSD router, but I only log into it every year or so, because, well, it just works.)

https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Steam

Systemd was kind of a problem many many years ago while it was a new thing and still barely tested, but now it's mostly stable. Don't let your past experience impair your judgement of how things are in 2023. Everybody putting money on Linux is on systemd.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/Init

I'm running Debian 12 (since the soft freeze I think) on my newly built AMD 7700X. I wouldn't exactly call that "ancient hardware".

Zero issue. No headaches for me. FWIW I'm running Debian since Debian 1.1 (1.1, not 11).

Alternatively, one can use OCI containers (e.g. Docker) for something even more recent, or software unavailable on Debian altogether. That way, you can have a very stable base server OS, with isolated bits of something more recent, feature packed, albeit sometimes a bit more unstable.

Those aren't the only options, of course, but they are pretty viable, depending on your use case. Personally, I also didn't see any issues with the ~10 year EOL of some of the RPM distros, as long as you care mostly about security updates/stability and not recent features.

I've had an order of magnitude more breakage on regular Ubuntu updates than on Debian testing. That being said, I ditched Ubuntu probably a decade ago and it might go out better now.

Anything of importance has deb package/official deb repo (Chrome, Brave, VS Code, Slack, Signal, Dropbox, etc), so you receive latest versions. There is flatpak as well. Newer kernel and some libraries could be found in backports repo.

I use Debian with 0 flatpaks/snaps/Appimages, only Debian repos and few official third-party ones.

I think Flatpak would be current best choice for these tasks if you are running a stable distro. But I think it would be good to have a distro where core OS and user application is completely separated, and can be updated independently. It would be nice to have latest application without fearing the next grub/DE/kernel/driver/... update might break your current setup.

There is nuance here. Technically, this is how it currently is, since the "core OS" is the kernel, and you can absolutely update that separately from everything else.

But lots of what people tend to think of as the "OS" are just applications (in Linux, anyway), so if that's the point of view, then it gets trickier. You can still update that stuff independently, but you have to decide what parts count as "core OS" to you and you'll need to update each of them independently.

True "user applications" are updateable independently.

Use the Source, Luke.

If there's something too shiny that I really need on my Debian, I compile it from source.

For example Emacs 29, with tree-sitter and whatnots, is just too shiny. So I compile it from source.

[EDIT] And, yeah, I know you can probably get a similar effect with Nix, but, ah, no. I tried it in a VM a couple years back, and it's a hard no. And I was a Gentoo user for years, so I'm not necessarily averse to some pain... but no.

On the off chance that I need some library, I may use a backports mirror. But I am not needing any at the moment and don't recall the last time I had to use backports. Must have been at least a couple of years since...

I also used to run Debian on my server machines but switched to NixOS - although I'm now seriously considering switching back to Debian since it has far less headaches and just works.

About the rest of the software, it's not very important which version I have. Actually, staying for years on an older Gnome shell won't force me to spend time to adapt to or disable new weirdnesses. Libre Office from n years ago would be OK. Evince, the same. Nautilus, give me the one from 2008.

Also, things just work. There's no application that I need that needs to be absolutely using the latest version. The only apps I can think of that require this auto-update themselves, like Steam and Bitwarden (for which I use an AppImage).

I'm not running anything fancy locally so perhaps it's an unusual case, and I will admit that I can't print from my desktop for reasons I've never bothered to look into, so the experience isn't 100%; but I prefer it to running Windows, which is becoming more and more like an OS-as-a-service-with-ads by the day.

Personally, there's only been one time in the last decade or so that not using the latest version of something has caused any real headache for me, and that was a manageable situation.

You want Testing. I don't think people really use Unstable unless they work on Debian itself.

It's such an odd technical choice that makes snap look bad for a few megs.

I don't have to optimise my machine to get the calculator run within 1-2 seconds, this is just bad by design and there is no excuse.

They are an abomination or workaround for problems in OS library packaging (& manager) and OS security concepts.

If snaps are so cool why are there no similar concepts in other famous major desktops (even non Linux)?

APKs are pretty much the Android equivalent. In both cases the key features are sandboxing and bundling of dependencies. The stores also work roughly equivalently - like with snaps you can install an APK without a store, and that mechanism is what alternative stores use, but for full integration there's really just one: the Google Play Store.

iOS works pretty much the same way too, as far as I understand.

And sideloading. I prefer to sideload when possible.

Early Ubtuntu & Mark Shuttleworth were a big part of my teens and my first real experience with a Linux Desktop and Philosophy tied to Open Source Software.

It's been fun watching Ubuntu evolve over the years and see distros like Mint evolve off of them as well.

Ubuntu wasn't especially bad, it was more that Silverblue made so much sense. It fixed the issues I was having with other distros where messiness would creep into my setup over time.

I also tried NixOS, but it felt too rigid. Silverblue offered the same benefits of immutability without a loss of flexibility.

I use a combination of toolbox, distrobox, flatpak, docker, homebrew, junest and custom bwrap scripts.

For graphical apps (browsers etc.) the flatpaks are very handy.

The above setup means I don't really need to layer much in the OS, mainly drivers and common terminal utilities.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/107lvlf/silverblue_...

Would I use it for a mission critical workstation or server? Probably not. But for daily personal use, it's been completely fine for me and I would highly recommend it to others.

Slightly tangential question: Is there a distro that has a stable "core" (kernel, maybe some userspace libraries) but uses rolling releases for everything else? Ideally, that would probably give you the best of both worlds for a personal machine.

I'm aware this isn't exactly what you were asking for—and with the disclaimer that I spent a lot of years as a Linux desktop user, so I do have a great deal of experience with how that "half" lives, but: this is one of the things that's so nice about MacOS + Homebrew. It's a very stable core (up through and including the graphical environment—after all, if that breaks on a workstation/desktop, that's nearly as bad as the whole OS breaking) that only updates every couple years (and I can ignore the updates a long time without notable consequences) with a very-high-package-count package manager that's rolling-release on top of it, for most of the software I directly use.

I'd love to see a Linux distro that worked that way—I don't think I could go back to doing package management the typical Linux way, on my workstation. I've done rolling-release, I've done everything-stable-and-maybe-some-bodged-in-extra-repositories-for-newer-stuff, and both suck, for my needs, compared to this arrangement. Stable core + rolling applications is great, would be thrilled to see more Linux distros explore that kind of thing.

Immutable distributions like Fedora Silverblue seem to lean in that direction, though I've never used them personally.

Editing a file in /etc/ feels like PEEK/POKEing to memory now. Barbaric.

It makes perfect sense to me that you’d feel that Fedora struck a better balance for you.

Many people prefer Debian based distros. Some people use Debian on the desktop because they prefer less frequent updates (among other reasons).

I’m just stating the obvious here, really.

There's my personal anecdote.

Exactly: my productive environment is «out of the browser» and I want it to be as fitting as possible, for my efficiency and comfort.

Your world does, and I know that it does for many. But mine absolutely doesn't -- there isn't anything critical I use that is browser-based. And many are like me.

Different strokes and all that.

I’ve run Mac for 20 years now, and before that Linux for almost 10. I can’t think of anything I lost when switching beyond focus follows mouse.

There is a certain irony when the Linux Desktop is on minority when looking around laptops at FOSDEM.

Others might too, those are the only two I have experience with though.

I tried Nix but couldn't figure out how to install some software I needed (dealt with plugins).

I tried Manjaro but the system was unbootable after a software update soon after install and I just don't want to fight problems like that anymore.

I've been using Mint but recently am giving PopOs a try but they've not fixed enough of the Gnome 3 usability problems.

Been a deb used for decades at this point but maybe I'll give Fedora a try next, either going with XFCE (like I did with Mint) or KDE.

My experience is you get what Ubuntu used to have that way, i.e. no thrills reliability, so would definitely recommend it

Stop relying on "user friendly" distros, you haven't needed them for almost a decade, most common distributions run out of the box with no problems most of the time.

What else can you recommend that does that?

There's also Linux Mint and Debian if you're hell bent on apt. They usually work right out of the box like Ubuntu does.

If you can't install snap packages, your distro is useless.

But you're free to add snap to anything you like. The problem with Ubuntu is forcing it on users, not simply that snap exists.

You asked what other distro would get you going as quickly as Ubuntu.

Looks like Regolith can in theory be installed on top of Pop!_OS which seems to target the same audience while going in a more sensible direction. Anybody tried that combo, or have any feedback on PopOS in general?

I have had some trouble with the Pop Shop leaking memory, freezing, and crashing, but you can disable it and use Gnome Software if you want a gui.

I like how they need to defend themselves for using a 5 year old laptop.

I have a 2016 Dell latitude laying around with Debian 11 on it. It is plenty fast for most things. Even running virtual machines in virtual box with gaming (mostly older Windows games I run in a WinXP VM)

The big improvement with modern laptops isn't compute power, it's energy efficiency and thus battery life, and also weight. Modern laptops are a lot easier to carry than 10-year-old models since they weigh a fraction as much.

It's a chunky laptop, but gets me going when I travel to a place where security can be iffy. So looks like an old VCR, and get less attention than an apple logo.

Heck, a medium-spec 20 year old computer is plenty fast for common desktop use.

What drove me from Fedora was mostly the need to upgrade every 6 months, and the short support windows.

While obviously Manjaro has a nice and pleasant GUI installer, it is a pretty weird distro with many quirks and not having some familiarity with Arch is probably a bad thing.

In my personal oppinion I have trusted Arch enough to rely on it for my education, it is a remarkably solid and reliable distro, regardless of the jokes about it. But I wouldn't put the same trust into Manjaro, it is definitely a weirder distro with more points of failure.

As a mitigation, I use Nix to run anything that isn't packaged for Alpine (e.g. Deno), and that actually works pretty well, but having a parallel set of libraries kind of defeats my whole purpose for running Alpine, namely a having trim system without any bloat (on a netbook with 1 GB of RAM).

Note that, in my case, I'm not using Alpine for the "user experience", but solely because it is the most lightweight distribution (important when running on a machine with 1 GB of RAM). I was able to set up a C programming environment on a Raspberry Pi in only 300 MB... of disk space, not RAM! :)

Most recently, I had Manjaro running on my Thinkpad for about 3 years before I wiped it and put W10 on it for my fiancee. Since getting a Steam Deck I've been eyeballing Linux on the desktop again, having seen firsthand how well Proton works.

Having effectively been a Linux baby 3 times, I have to say Manjaro was everything I thought Ubuntu would be when I tried it. I remember Ubuntu being intractable, hard to use, and weird to update. Manjaro seemed almost effortless to use, and honestly I'd probably recommend it to a Windows user over any other offerings at the current juncture.

Disclaimer: I work for Canonical but have nothing to do with the distribution or Ubuntu Pro. And I am not speaking on behalf of the company.

Every time I end up on the Ubuntu machine: "sudo apt install somet<tab><tab>" nothing. Urgh. Off I go to Google "install <package> Ubuntu" and visit some third party website for a .deb.

If I wanted to circumvent the packaging system by default, I'd use Windows.

I guess my needs are meager.

Okay, I don't *need* to install Minecraft, but I like it.

Yes, Edge works just great on Linux, probably better than it does on Windows.

I am not a typical Linux user. I have been doing weird and unsupported shit with it since kernel 0.93 and I know what I'm getting into before I unscrew the lid.

(Their attitude toward Systemd is one thing that got me on board. They had healthy criticism and waited a bit, but weren't all like NEVER EVER! and eventually made room for it.)

This was a while ago, probably about ten years ago, and I've used Ubuntu ever since.

1. NVidia seem to love debian/ubuntu more that other distros, and in general I don't want to waste much time with setting up machine learning env/CUDA on my machines

2. work has debian based distro, so using same tool/mindset is convenient

but I really want to get rid of it because of snaps and overall attitute (previous controversies with their unity desktop manager, ads in it etc). I kind of didn't cared much then as I switched to Mint linux (even that had different distro names to annoy when need to set nvidia) and went back then ubuntu + i3. Right now it seems it's time to ditch ubuntu completely.

    services.xserver.videoDrivers = [ "nvidia" ];

    {
      outputs = { self, nixpkgs }:
      let pkgs = import nixpkgs
          {
            inherit x86_64-linux;
            config.allowUnfree = true;
            config.cudaSupport = true;
          };
      in
        {
          # Environment 
        };
      };
    }

If you want something on the desktop that is close enough to Ubuntu but without the snaps, you might want to have a look at Linux Mint: https://linuxmint.com/

Or some might also just use Debian with a desktop environment installed, there's not too many reasons to not do that.

I will never not think of Manjaro as a clown show after this: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/31yayt/manjaro_forgo... https://i.imgur.com/qV7QrQB.png

Rocky Linux?

There are a few anomalies, I suspect mostly from the fact that Gnome is a post install add on. The Gnome network applet doesn't work but the network works fine. The only thing that is problematic on the PI is Firefox - it lags.

I intend to slowly migrate my other systems -Desktop, Digital Ocean to Debian after a bit longer.

https://dietpi.com

The Snap hate is really overblown. I'm using some to work daily and, apart from the annoying notification that appears far less than before (like once by a blue moon now on my system), they work exactly like .deb files.

Every OS suck in their own specific way. Fix the problems or move on to your new and shiny evergreen OS.

The snap wouldn't install, I couldn't figure out how to make it work, it seemed to get stuck trying to mount something from some unspecified device. I needed Firefox to keep working, but was forced to stop work to figure out what was broken. Decided to go around it.

Went to some unofficial mozilla PPA with "apt" incantations to force the apt version to take precedence. This version also mysteriously stops upgrading when the snap version becomes newer, or something. I am forced to reinstall it periodically. Possibly a Firefox packaging bug, or maybe I'm not clever enough to understand the interdependencies between apt and snap.

The whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't want to debug this snap thing that I never asked for. I feel like I am dealing with some corporation, not open source software. As soon as I get some down time, I'll say bye-bye to Ubuntu.

I see what Ubuntu is doing. I understand what they're doing as a business, and I don't like it and have every right to criticize it for what it is. Ubuntu built their brand on the promise of free and open source and then more and more cozied up to Microsoft and an "us only" way of doing things.

They are free to do that and I understand why as a business. But I'm also just as free to call it out and say I don't like it and steer people away from that sad story.

(MX Linux is what I'm rolling with for now.)

I don't care about "purity," I care about "annoying." If you acknowledge that some of Ubuntu's business decisions create annoyances, why dismiss people who just want their computers to work as being irrational?

> Every OS suck in their own specific way.

This is the law of averages. It is not a law.

Or just ssh into a headless instance, keeping the UNIX tradition it was designed for.

Also, as a CS teacher I've been forcing about 80 students to run Manjaro KDE full-time. The complaining is not nearly as loud as one would imagine. :-)

Instead I’m solidly confident that macOS as a daily driver is the right choice for a busy developer who doesn’t want to mess with stuff.

Everyone of course is going to have different experiences, but I continue to be disappointed how issue ridden MacOS Ventura has been for me. My Fedora laptop could run for weeks without the need for a reboot (honestly only necessary because I used Silverblue which is immutable), whereas my Macbook constantly has issues adjusting scaling when plugging in a monitor during sleep (necessitating logging out and in), or randomly failing to connect to any WiFi connection after waking up, requiring a full reboot around three times a week.

The settings app is appalling too, I genuinely am flabbergasted how sluggish (as in not loading settings pages for multiple seconds) it can be, especially considering the hardware. Very rarely, Xcode will try to open even though I set VSCode as the default for that file type, but this may be user error (though I don't see what else I can do beyond click that tick). Also, though this is more their design than a fault, I have become far to reliant on dnf via toolbox and whilst I am thankful for Homebrew, I can't stop feeling that a more integrated package manager would make MacOS more usable. Worst of all though is how MacOS handles USB peripherals. Upon plugging in, it should ask for confirmation, a good idea in theory. But for me, no matter the device (printer, usb drive, hub, display), this confirmation window only appears for a split second before disappearing. I then have to unplug and replug the cable about five times before, for some magic reason, the confirmation window stays upon permanently and I can actually interact with it. I tried a fresh install and spend a bit of time on the phone with customer support, neither helped. Simply cannot see MacOS as the choice for someone who needs to rely on their machine in this state.

I'm constantly testing the Asahi Fedora Remix[0] and cannot wait for that to be at a level where I can use it day-to-day. The hardware is amazing, but the software really needs to be improved.

[0] https://pagure.io/fedora-asahi/asahi-repos/tree/main

This is true in the way you intend it, but also in a way that you don't.

Yes, macOS "just works" for most stuff--so you don't have to mess with it.

However, if you hit one of those things that does not just work, you can't mess with it so you still don't have to mess with it.

(Yes, I have hit them and they were enough to make me leave the macOS system. USB and Bluetooth are perennial frustrations for me with macOS and there are active threads with dozens of pages of complaints--so it isn't just me.)

Thanks Ubuntu maintainers & backers

I have never used it myself, but from everything I've heard about it I'm kind of surprised how popular it is.

That is largely the point. Though they are not using it by moving to a distro where it isn't “native” so they don't have to do things more manually for some packages that they need/want.

Yes, because installing Firefox from source, and updating every few days when new security updates are released, is so easy...

It is possible to switch to a PPA for Firefox, but installing it isn't quite trivial, since Ubuntu really doesn't want you doing it that way. With this, and so many other decisions that Ubuntu has been making in recent years, it's easier to just find another distro better aligned to my interests.

Not to mention Ubuntu moves more and more stuff to Snap and you get to the ridiculous situation of a basic calculator needing seconds to start. Yeah, frak that.

Furthermore, I use various CLI tools regularly in my work and I can't wait for Debian to update them 6 months in the future.

I need something that has the minimum amount of background processes but also without suffering any user or developer usability problems; so not like the absolutely minimal set of services but the minimally viable set of services that give you very usable machine without any bloat.

Maybe Arch is the best for my criteria but I installed Manjaro and never looked back since (2.5 years now). The only one problem I ever had was I think December 2022 when they shipped an OpenSSH version that hard-deprecated (read: removed / stopped support for) certain crypto algorithms, and my key was of course using one of them. I grumbled but connected a display and keyboard to the machine (it's one of my servers at home), migrated my keys to the new algorithms, put them on a USB pen drive, put them on my workstation and all was right again.

Not even once had I any of the "rolling distribution" problems that people mention regularly on Reddit. Of course I might have been lucky.

Lately I am meticulously extracting a fully OS-neutral dotfiles configuration (and I am like 95% done) and then will create a OS-neutral bootstrapping set of scripts and will install Manjaro on 2 or 3 of my spare laptops and I expect no problems at all. It's a very "out of your way" distro and I love it for that.

(I am aware that there are people who have a beef with Manjaro because apparently they outright "stole" code -- which sounds meaningless to me when we're talking open-source, can somebody explain? -- and just rebranded stuff for themselves but as their user I can egotistically claim this has absolutely zero effect on me, I don't care and I use the distro because it hits the right spots for me.)

I love my iMac Pro but the tinkering possibilities are vastly reduced compared to any Linux box (example: I want to experiment with ZFS and BCacheFS but of course both are not supported on a Mac, and virtualization / containerization is much more inefficient -- and slow -- on a Mac compared to a Linux machine). I will very likely be buying an M2 (or M3 when they come out) laptop just for the excellent display and will do my work "on it" by actually remoting to a Linux workstation.

Plus, call me an old fart but I'd like my `ps aux` output to be maximum 70 lines long. I want control over my machine.

Maybe I'll come crying back to Macs in a few years, who knows. But I'll make a very serious effort to take back control of my computing in the meantime.

I really am not keen on manually downloading and loading kernel drivers. :( And I plan to start installing stuff on fairly random old laptops.

Do you have any extended experience with installing FreeBSD on all sorts of machines?

The hardware support thing made me nervous at first, but I don't expect it to be a major issue. We'll see.