I’m gonna comment and say that’s the point.

You start out with bare minimum and install what you need. As you go you generally have an idea of what is and isn’t on your system. It’s not as annoying as Gentoo with all source compiling, not as anal as nix.

If something breaks, you go to ArchLinux.org and 95% of the time it’s mentioned on the front page so you follow the instructions and move on. It’s a very transparent distro, little drama to follow unlike Ubuntu/canonical or fedora/redhat.

It used to be harder to install and which gave some street cred, but they simplified it a bit which is nice.

The Stans give an unbalanced look at arch. I use arch because I want the latest packages, I don’t want to segment my packages between my repos and tarballs when there’s a game stopping missing feature on a package pinned to a 2yo version. I don’t want to learn a whole scripting language to carefully craft my OS like nix either. I want a current OS that’s easy to fix and easy to install packages so I can go back to what I was doing.

I had only used kde once before like 7 years ago and I wasn’t a huge fan. I wanted to try it again and I honestly really like it over gnome. I usually go tiling but felt lazy with a new laptop. The trackpad gestures are really solid.

nmcli is quite nice actually. My only real issue with NM is keeping track of what it’s doing behind the scenes.

So I want and have ip forwarding, and I only want to make a firewall whitelist between two of the interfaces.

I’ve uninstalled iptables, nftables isn’t running, NM has the firewall backend disabled, and ip forwarding is on.

This should result in traffic moving between the interfaces, yet traffic is moving between two of the interfaces, and blocked between two of the interfaces. It just doesn’t make sense.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I’m using NM for managing the AP and managed connections, not so much the bare connecting to wifi things.

The only real alternative to NM in this situation is a handful of delicate config files for iwconfig and dnsmasq.

A lot of software wont be distributed with a PPA to add.

Additionally, debs are useful for offline installations, with apt you’re able to recursively download a package and all of it’s dependencies as deb files, then transfer those over to the offline machine and install in bulk.

That being said I’ve never had great luck with the software center, it’s always felt broken. I’ll typically just dpkg -I <pkg>.