This but going the “other direction” for me.

Learning maths has mostly consisted of a repetition of me thinking for a brief moment “yay! I know how to differentiate functions”, only to discover later a more general/different setting in which it was clear that no, I did not, in fact, know how to differentiate functions.

Downvote counter: average criticising Linux on Lemmy experience

Funnily enough, I thought like you and was rocking Debian and various derivatives for years. Then one day, for some stupid reason (an out-of-date library for a side project in the Debian repo) and out of curiosity I tried arch.

Honestly have not looked back since for a bunch of reasons.

First, the package manager (pacman) is just awesome and extremely fast. I remember quickly ditching fedora in the past because, in part, of how goddamn slow dnf was.

Then, it’s actually much lower maintenance than I’d initially believed. I maybe had to repair something once after an update broke, and that was expected and documented so no problem there. Plus the rolling release model just makes it easier to update without having version jumps.

Talking of documentation, the wiki is really solid. It was a reference for me even before using arch anyways, so now it’s even better.

People also tend to value the customisability (it is indeed easier in a sense), the lack of bloat (like apps installed by default that you never use), and the AUR.

And, to be fair, a good share of people are probably also just memeing to death.

So I don’t know whether you’re missing something, it depends what you think Arch is like. If you believe it to be this monster of difficulty to install, where you essentially build your own system entirely etc etc… then yeah, you’re missing that it’s become much simpler than this. Otherwise if having more up-to-date software, easier ways to configure things and a rather minimal base install so you can choose exactly what you want on your system does not appeal to you, then likely arch is not going to be your thing.

Oh yeah, I am forced to use it for work and it’s just incredible how innovative Microsoft is at making things worse. Takes real talent at that point.

This below is windows 11 consistency, within their own os context menus. I am not even starting on the fact that window decorations there too are a non standardised mess.

I agree that lack of UI consistency is less than ideal, and very real in Linux, but let’s not pretend that this is a main issue stopping people from migrating (from an equally inconsistent OS)

Haven’t used Debian in a while now, but back when I did, Wayland never did appear in the sessions dropdown on a fresh install with an nvidia card and nvidia proprietary drivers. Doing what is explained in the following link always worked for me though:

https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Wayland

Apologies if you have already tried this, but as I said, I’ve luckily not had to do more to get it to work, so hopefully it’s the same for you.