I’m going to highlight the relevant parts so you can skip forward to the most important parts:
I’ve been using Debian based distros for almost 20 years now and I have to say that every time I bought a new computer or I decided to switch for freshness I only checked other Debian based distros incl. obviously Ubuntu. More over, 100% of my webservers are Debian/Ubuntu
I have to say, that dist-updating on Ubuntu, has always felt like a pain in the ass. And in Debian, not a pain in the ass, but a reason to cry. Lately, I’ve been testing MX Linux in many VMs and my GF old laptop, but I was reading about the latest update from 19 and 21 where they recommended a fresh clean install, and that stirs my stomach. I hate formatting and clean installing, seriously.
The simple idea of having to back up/format makes me feel dizzy. For servers, I have many scripts to recover with all the changes because I document every single step I perform. But for desktop, I’m extremely messy, and I go on the flow, I’m not concerned about documenting a thing, I modify a ton of conf files that I would ever remember when and why I did modify them. So basically, if I had to reinstall due to a PC failure, I would have to admit a massive loss in configurations and move on. Maybe there is a super-advanced method to keep track of this the “Dropbox way”, but I’ve never heard about it. Maybe I should backup the whole /etc directory (and I have no idea on the implications of restoring over a newly static, updated distro). Apart from this, obviously, I keep backups of main fails, mostly on cloud sync systems, but the core: the aspect of the desktop, the order of my software, the configs of such, and any custom things I set on my PC, away from the /home directory, would be probably lost.
TL;TR 1: I would rather not format in 10 years if possible, but still be 100% updated to the latest package ever.
So, here I’ve wondered for ages if Rolling Releases could fit perfectly, but always been too lazy to take the step thinking: “I’m too busy and I would rather not waste a ton of time to switch, if I already master DEB”
So the real problem here is that I have not touched a single Arch-based distro in my whole life and I’ve been always worried that it would take ages to get the flow, and in case I encounter an issue, it would take days of researching in order to find the solution on a system I’ve never touched. I only know that there is a package manager like apt, called pacman and the parameters are not install, update, and upgrade, but an old school hyphen argument list
Apart from this, I’m not 100% confidant of the number of changes I may encounter, by just installing Manjaro for example, in my laptop, and just keep going.
I’ve tried installing Manjaro Plasma in a VM, and it feels simple at first glance. Just like any other KDE at first. It uses systemd, very Ubuntu-ish, and everything seems to be “in order”, ultimately is a Linux distro.
TL;TR 2: My real dilemma is this: Is there any single thing that you think is entirely different from Arch/Manjaro/… to Debian-based, and I will say: WTF is this? And I will need to waste 1-2-3 days or weeks reading docs to move on?