Ryan

I’ve been using wayblue on my own desktop. They have sane defaults & very pleasant theme. They do a good job keeping their image up to date & enable auto-updating from the get-go.

I never recommend Manjaro, even for experienced users. Multiple times, they’ve let their ssl certificats expire, and renewing those has been easy to automate for a number of years at this point. There have been a number of cases where they ship work-in-progress versions of software as part of their default install, and there was an open letter posted calling this out: https://dont-ship.it

So in my opinion, Manjaro leaves much to be desired from a project governance standpoint.

Now, using an Arch-based distro that does the install process for you doesn’t absolve you from learning what it takes to maintain an Arch install; at some point, something will crop-up that requires manual intervention to get back up & running again after an update.

If that is what you’re looking for, I suggest EndeavourOS.

If you want a rolling release, I suggest going with openSUSE Tumbleweed. The installer allows you to pick & choose what you do/don’t want/need, and has a great rollback system in case an update causes problems.

Otherwise, I would suggest Fedora. Stays very current, and the in-place upgrade process is very seamless at this point.

Yeah, the average user: 1) doesn’t care what’s running under the hood, and 2) doesn’t want to control what’s running under the hood.

I’m definitely not an “average user.” I like specifying that I don’t want wifi, bluetooth, or dvd functionality on my desktop when I have no need/desire to use them. So use flags are one of the main reasons I use Gentoo. Occasionally, it causes some mild irritation, but it’s a net-positive for me.

Can’t say that I’ve really used any of the features mentioned in this list, so doesn’t really affect my experience negatively. Also, updating some icon sets to fit with the overall theme would provide a more unified experience. So two thumbs-up from me for removing code that, by & large, wasn’t getting used, should help maintaining it in the long run.

I’ve read articles that were clearly created using ChatGPT, there was no extrapolation to add context/details to illustrate their points, and parts of it read like it just pulled from a Wikipedia page. The tone felt more robotic than pieces they published 6~8 months ago.

ChatGPT can be useful when it’s part of a larger writing process, but I have a feeling that sites that create prompts and paste the output as their articles will slowly die-off because the quality isn’t there.