Fedora Workstation has been really good in my experience. The available software is shockingly up to date and I haven’t run into much breakage of any kind in the year or so I’ve been using it across 2 systems (despite my best efforts every few months when the urge to tinker hits me). I do occasionally run into issues caused by the default SELinux policies, but they’re not especially difficult to work around if you’re comfortable using the terminal.

I do share your sentiment about the AUR - I definitely miss it at times. That said, Flatpaks and the fact that pre-built RPMs are so commonplace have both softened the blow a lot.

Odds are, it’s usually the opposite because they’re insecure and can’t handle when people do things differently from them.

If this isn’t projection then I don’t know what is.

When is the last time you tried a Wayland DE? I can’t speak to them all, but Plasma for one has been in really good shape for basically everything a typical user might want to do with it for around a year now.

X11 versus Wayland isn’t some kind of holy war; Wayland was specifically designed as a successor protocol to the largely cobbled-together X and is objectively superior to it in most ways outside of accessibility.

“systemd bad”

Not sure what the situation is on the NVIDIA side, but Mesa’s raytracing performance is… lacking. Don’t get me wrong; it’s amazing that it works as well as it does, but even with a high-end card it’s not the best experience. I don’t personally care much about RT, but if I were more into it I would probably consider setting up a Windows dual-boot.

The way I look at it is that most of my time spent fighting with the compiler is usually made up for in time saved debugging. I’m in the process of RIIRing a hobby project and so far most of the ported code just works, and I only end up needing to fix a few dumb logic mistakes before it’s fully up and running.

I’m not familiar with the specific install/upgrade process on Gentoo so maybe I’m missing something, but what’s wrong with forcing new installations to use time64 and then forcing existing installs to do some of offline migration from a live disk a decade or so down the line? I feel like it’s probably somewhat uncommon for an installation of any distro to be used continuously for that amount of time (at least in a desktop context), and if anyone could be expected to be able to handle a manual intervention like this, it’s long-time Gentoo users.

The bonus of this would be that it wouldn’t be necessary to introduce a new lib* folder - the entire system either uses time64 or it doesn’t. Maybe this still wouldn’t be possible though depending on how source packages are distributed; like I said I dont really know Gentoo.

I hate when people insist that Arch isn’t easier to break. There was an incident a couple of years ago where a Grub update was rolled out that required that grub-mkconfig be re-run manually, and if you failed to do this the system would brick and you’d need to fix it in a recovery environment. This happened to my laptop while I was on vacation, and while I had luckily had the foresight to bring a flash drive full of ISOs, it was a real pain to fix.

Yes, Arch offers a lot more stability than people give it credit for, but it’s still less reliable than the popular point-release distros like Fedora or Ubuntu, and there’s not really any way around that with a rolling-release model. As someone who is at a point in life where I don’t always have the time nor energy to deal with random breakage (however infrequently), having the extra peace of mind is nice.

To answer some of your questions:

1. Fedora has two major releases per year. I’ve only been using it long enough to do one upgrade, but it was basically seamless and the same as any normal incremental update, except it took longer to apply.
2. I can’t speak for other DEs, but the Plasma spin provides a system setting to apply updates automatically. I haven’t used it myself, but it’s literally just a radio button so I imagine it’s pretty easy to get working.
3. SELinux for the most part is unobtrusive, but it can definitely be a pain when trying to do more advanced things on the system. For instance, it needs to be specially configured to allow systemd-hibernate to work, and I still haven’t gotten hibernate-after-sleep to work at all (though that might not be SELinux’s fault, I haven’t found time to follow up on it. You can also disable it, though, if it gets too much in the way.

I can’t speak to Arc support or RAID specifically, although if the data on the RAID array is vital then you NEED to have at least one backup before you even think about installing a new OS.

“Old man yells at cloud”

Doesn’t trixie still support like a dozen arches? I think one of the more recent deprecations was MIPS BE which is functionally obsolete in 2024, at least insofar as practically no one is using it to run a modern distribution.

Nope, doesn’t have any of the hallmarks of an LLM and LLMs aren’t yet clever enough to produce original humor like that.

Heartbleed was the result of an accidental buffer overread bug, not a backdoor.