Arch has more mirrors for sure. But my point was on delta updates which technically make updating flatpaks faster and less bandwidth consuming, runtimes aside.

Guess what, Flatpaks have delta updates (a criminally underrated feature) so all things equal, updates are technically faster than pacman.

Guess what if you installed a DE, other than the tiling ones, it came with bloat.

You probably also use systemd, another infamous piece of bloatware. /s

Gentoo has less bloat than Arch if really want to get into nitpicking.

You can definitely make an alias for this if all you want is a single command.

PS. I don’t think what you describe is a killer feature.

Only a Gentoo user can make that claim. Hope you are one.

Benefits any software dev on Linux, as flatpak ships all your dependencies in one “container”. This allows you to deploy once and forget about whether some Ubuntu system dependency is on the same version/compatible with your test environment. Software that works everywhere is the biggest win of flatpaks. One could also make the same argument for snaps except the package repository is closed-sourced.

For me, it allows an easy configurable sandbox with Flatseal. This is the main reason I use flatpaks TBH, software is packaged with too much express permissions on Linux. You also get delta updates. Plus I don’t have to worry about mucking around with system packages if for example some dependency is not available or needs building/installing.

What if the extension is actual malware?

Yeah.

VLC is good everywhere even though it cannot compare to MPV in number of features available. It will work for most people just fine.

Disagree. Arch is not stable at all, couldn’t be even if you wanted it to be.

Bugs and regressions get introduced upstream all the time, these have a tendency to slip from testing into the main repos.

Case in point, a recent glib2 update was causing NetworkManager to coredump sporadically.

And you have to always use downgrade. Example, the newer 6.5 kernels break thermald 2.5.4 for me, so I have to downgrade a step downwards.

Are these problems because of Arch? Not necessarily but the rolling release model has a role to play in these types of regressions & bugs.

An LTS type of distro will face other different types of bugs. Outdated software libraries/dependencies that are rendered incompatible etc.

But these are few and far between compared to rolling release where everything is in a constant state of change.

Nothing will teach you the basics of Linux better than a good ol’ Arch installation.

It’s heavily Intel-optimized as you can tell from the project’s page. The distro is primarily aimed at container workloads but there’s no harm in using it as a desktop distro. It’s supposedly fast! (according to Phoronix benchmarks).

Nope. VLC uses system libraries, unless you install through something that ships its own dependencies like flatpak.

Glad am not using a deb based distro.

Arch is bound to break every once in a while, that’s just the deal you get with a rolling release distro. If stability is all you want, you can go with the BTRFS snapshots and hope to heavens this setup doesn’t break or use something stable like Debian or Fedora.

They have never gone after said distros all those ^{many many} years they have bundled licensed codecs in their ISOs. What changed?

It’s crazy that Linux distros think that installing codecs is a reasonable expectation for users. Especially users new to Linux.

The non-free components I’ve seen on installers are usually for Nvidia’s proprietary drivers. Not codecs.

Sounds like legal panic if you ask me. There’s been no precedent for litigation on use of licensed codecs which most have been using either way prior in their builds and packages.

More annoyed when the distro doesn’t even bother to document how to properly install the “missing” codecs.

I don’t care about the licenses. If I click on my media and it refuses to play because some codec is omitted by default, am annoyed nonetheless.