It is a digital signage display (ie in store ads, menus, displays etc) - not meant for desktop use.

I think their though process is more along the line of:

Hey, Microsoft is getting all the bad attention ATM, let’s see how much shit we can sneak in while people are distracted.

Except desktop environments - they are far from a simple loosely collection of simple stuff. They coordinate your whole desktop experience. Apps need to talk to them a lot and often in ways specific to a single DE. Theming applications is done differently for every toolkit there is, startup applications (before systemd) is configured differently, global shortcuts are configured differently by each one… If anything it is something you interact with far more than systemd and has far more inconsistencies between each one. Yet few people complain about this as much as they complain about systemd.

Systemd is a giant mess of weirdly interdependent things that used to be simple things.

They used to be simple things back when hardware and the way we use computers were much simpler. Nowadays hardware and computers are much more dynamic and hotplugable and handle a lot more state that needs to persist and be kept track of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo is a great talk on the subject and talks about why systemd does what it does.

What standards? The old init systems were a loose collection of shell scripts that were wildly different on every distro. Other tools like sudo also broke the established standards of the time, before it you had to login as root with the root password.

Even gnome and KDE have their own themeing standards as well as other ways of doing things. Even network manager is its own standard not following things that came before it. Then there are flatpack, snaps and app images. Not to mention deb vs rpm vs pacman vs nix package formats. Loads of things in Linux userland have broken or evolved the standards of oldern times.

Systemd does a lot of things that could probably be separate projects,

I dont get the hate for this - Linux is full of projects that do the same thing: coreutils, busybox, kde, gnome, different office suites, even the kernel itself. It is very common for different related projects to be maintained together under the same project/branding with various different levels of integration between them. But people really seem to only hate on systemd for this…

You are forgetting about Nintendo. And that is only mentioning gaming companies… look outside gaming and there is a whole shit-show going on at the moment for that position.

Players get sustained access to the game.

That should be the default for any game you have brought… not a compromise… Forcing everyone to have an account only serve to benefit Sony.

If they can make it such that you can have a placeholder Sony account that can’t access all PSN features, for the sole purpose to play this and other Sony games on Steam, that anyone in the world can access, that would be an acceptable compromise to me.

If they did that then what is the point in requiring a login at all… just remove the damned feature that is not required and very few want. We know it is not required as the game has been working fine for months without it. There is zero need for you to need a login for this game. Except that sony wants more user information they can sell to others.

Not technically. unetbootin and some similar tools like rufus take the USB, partition it, and copy the contents of the disk to it after manually setting up a bootloader on it. This is not required for most Linux ISOs though where you can just cp or dd the image directly to the USB as they are already setup with all that on the image. But other ISOs, like I believe Windows ones have a filesystem on them that is not vfat so cannot be directly copied. Although these days for windows you just need to format the USB as vfat and copy the contents of the windows ISO (aka the files inside it, not the iso filesystem) to the filesystem.

I tend to find unetbootin and rufus break more ISOs then they actually help with though. Personally I find ventoy is the better approach overall, just copy the ISO as a file to the USB filesystem (and you can copy multiple ones as well).

Ubuntu is a fork of unstable Debian packages. You don’t want unstable on your server!

Unstable does not mean crashes all the time. What makes them unstable on Debian is they can change and break API completely. But guess what, Ubuntu freezes the versions for their release and maintains their own security patches, completely mitigating that issue.

There are other reasons you might not want to use Ubuntu on a server but package version stability is not one of them.

I don’t know, it does have official in the name tag. People would not lie about that. Right?

A system us bloated when I feel it is bloated. It is highly subjective and there is no real line to cross. It is just more of a sliding scale, at one end there is no code on your system that you never use and at the other there is nothing on it that you ever want to use.

The former can likely on be reached on small microcontrollers where you have written everything exactly how you want it, and you would never even consider using the latter.

Realistically every system has things younever use, even the kernel has modules you will never load. And every non tiny program has features you never use. All of that is technically bloat but each instance I don’t think makes your system or even an application feel bloated.

So really the question is when does the bloat bother you or get in your way. If you are trying to install an OS on a tiny embedded device where space is a premiumthenn you are going to draw that line at a different point to on the latest desktop with multi terabytes of storages and oodles of ram.

Anyone that claims there system has no bloat is technically lying to themselves. But if it makes them happy who cares? If your system has every package installed and it does not bother you at all thenitt does not matter at all.

So, basically every system then?

How do we know these are the AI chatbots instructions and not just instructions it made up? They make things up all the time, why do we trust it in this instance?

The core is immutable, but it comes with flatpak which writes to a writeable location so you can install and update applications independently of OS updates without having them wiped after an upgrade. You can also install and use tools like distrobox to give you container environments that you can install and change as much as you like as well.

It seems to be geared toward people who want to constantly maintain there system

That is where your assumptions are wrong. It is for people that know how and want control over their setup. But after the initial setup maintenance is no worst that any other distro - simpler even in the longer term. Just update your packages and very occasionally manually update a config somewhere or run an extra command before hand (I honestly cannot remember the last time I even needed to do that much…). Far easier than needing to reinstall or fix a whole bunch of broken things after a major system upgrade that happens every few years on other distros.

People that like to tinker and break their system can do that on any distro. That does not mean it is high maintenance, quite the opposite in fact as it is easier to fix as Arch is generally easier to fix when you do break something (so does attract people that do like to tinker). But leave it alone and it wont just randomly break every week like so many people seem to think it does.

You dont even need a separate partition, just delete the non-home directories and reinstall. pacstrap might even do that for you 🤔 it has been a while since i last needed to reinstall. And most of the time you dont even need a full reinstall, Arch is trivial to fix most things from a live cd by partially following the install process - most often get a chroot and start reinstalling select packages/configs in some of the worst case scenarios.

Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to really daily-drive Linux (and this Arch experiment is no exception). Don’t get me wrong: I love linux and the idea of having independent open-source and infinitely customizable OS. But unfortunately I professionally rely on some of the apps, that have no viable alternatives for Linux (PowerPoint, Photoshop, Illustrator, Proton Drive).

There are viable alternatives for Linux as you mentioned. But non are going to just be drop-in replacements for those tools. There are a lot of graphics design tools out there now that are just as powerful as Photoshop for what most people need. But the big issue is they are different in just enough ways that it can be a challenge to switch to them once you are used to the way Photoshop and the other windows only tools work. This is just something you are going to have to get over if you want to try Linux longer term.

But it can be far too much to switch all at once and with a completely new OS as well. So don’t. Instead start using these tools and alternative on your Windows install now. Start trying out different ones (there are a lot, both open and closed source), and giving each a decent attempt to use. Start out with smaller side projects so you don’t interrupt your main workflows and slowly over time start learning and getting used to the different way these other tools work. If you make some effort to do that while on Windows then the next time you try out Linux they wont seem as bad. But if you keep sticking with Windows only software on Windows you are going to find the same issue every time you try to switch.

How the hell is arch so large? My laptop is only 27GB and that includes all user data and several years of crap being installed as well as several docker images. A fresh install should rival that fedora install.

Oh, just invest in adobe and get it developed for Linux - easy, why didnt anyone think of this before. And better yet, if they do invest they could make it a PopOS exclusive!!?!?!! \s

It wont work because Adobe does not care and there is not enough market share in Linux for them to bother with it. No amount of money that PopOS has will be able to convince Adobe to develop it for Linux and there is no way in hell Adobe will give them access to their source to develop it for Linux. That whole argument is just a non-starter.