You’ve got it right. I appreciate the directiness of the forum moderator because it was a clear signal to me that the Arch community doesn’t value my experience at the level I would like.

Supporting iMacs for 8 years taught me Apple doesn’t value my experience either. I’m happy to upend my system and workflow if it means I’m a step closer to living in the world I want to exist. Most of my life is chosen for me so I want the decisions I have control over to be meaningful to me.

I’d like to be able to take it all in but I can go weeks without the energy or interest to read a wall of text. Other times I’ll start an update and lose interest while it downloads. I realize these are personal problems but that’s why I value custom tools like Linux I can adapt to my needs and shortfalls.

You’re probably right, this is a issue that isn’t unique to Arch. In this case, I would have been fine if a default had been chosen for people who didn’t do the reading. Something like installing a plugin that will keep basic functionally of the app working.

I agree that reviewing terminal output is a valuable skill. I’m often lacking the attention or energy to pay attention to every update. I wish that wasn’t the case because I believe I have higher than average emotional reactions when things go unexpectedly but the lack of attention -> unexpected event -> emotional reaction loop is a pattern of my life I’ve come to accept.

Luckily just installing the plugins worked. Thank you for offering advice.

Debian is my go to for setting up a new server because of the stability and project longevity.

The excitement of features from the cutting edge gives me free energy to start new projects that I don’t experience if I wait for the stable release.

Opensuse Tumbleweed has made my list to try out.

Thanks for CachyOS. This is my first time hearing of it so I’ve got some reading to do.

My first experience with Linux was Ubuntu back in 2007! I thought it was interesting but didn’t become a Linux user until 12 years later when I realized gaming was possible without dual booting.

Something I experience a lot is getting excited for new features. It gives me an energy I can use to start a project I wouldn’t have done otherwise. I need to be able to start soon after hearing about the new feature or I risk losing the excitement and missing out on the energy it would have provided.

You just gave me words for something that was previously just vague internal grumbling and emotions.

Manjaro knows how to aesthetically please me with their color choices and background art. I’ve got a negative impression from various podcasts and forum posts but I’m realizing I need to look into that more because I can’t recall specifics besides something about a past issue with package distribution.

I don’t mind trading upfront effort for stability. I enjoyed setting up Arch and I’m still benefiting from insights gained from choosing my setup packages there.

Having nearly latest versions of packages is important to me because I can get into a flow after the initial excitement of a new feature being released but if I have to wait long to get my hands on it that won’t happen. In this case, a smaller loss of my excitement to watch a video happened in the time it took me to figure out what was up with VLC.

Thanks! This wasn’t a distro I knew much about but it’s looking like one I will try out. The way they test packages is exactly the kind of choices around updates I’m looking for.

I like how many options Yast exposes. I enjoyed learning how to do most of what I need in the terminal with Arch but being able to do everything I need through GUI helps when I’m not able to recall a lot in the moment but still need to do a thing.

I like having Timeshift in place for if I can’t figure out what went wrong.

In this case, I didn’t use VLC until days after I had updated so my mind didn’t go to an issue from updating right away. I make a high amount of accidental inputs while using laptops and I don’t always notice so a lot of my issues end up being unintentional configuration changes from weeks or months ago.

Thanks for the suggestion. I enjoyed how much I learned from picking out packages to get Arch working. I’m getting a similar excitement reading about Gentoo use flags. Giving it serious consideration.

I enjoyed getting to pick out a lot of the small details by choosing what was going on my system. Something about having the minimum amount needed to meet my needs eases a variety of my computing related anxieties.

I’ve always managed to solve issues I’ve encountered but reading that forum post made me realize I may have been attributing issues from updates to Linux in general instead of my distro choice.

Installing the dependencies did fix it.

I decided I wanted to switch because in the time it took for me to figure that out I lost the excitement for what I was about to watch.

You’re right, I was leaning heavily on the events to give context for defining the attitude (maybe policy would be a less loaded word for me to use). I don’t like the expectation that I would have to look for information in multiple places before updating. I’d prefer to be able to update often without needing to take in a lot of information.

It’s more like they expect you to do more reading than I would like to do. If I had been reading more of what they would like, I would have known I was expected to make a decision before updating and install an additional package. So from that view, they didn’t push a breaking update.