That’s what happens when you make it expensive to import anything and don’t have any domestic manufacturing for computer components.

Just dont format the drive when installing a new distro. BTRFS or not you can delete the system folders manually first if needed but I believe that some if not all distros will delete the system folders for you (at least ubuntu used to do this last I tried). And if not you can do it manually.

It does not matter if you have a separate partition or not for /home installers won’t touch it if it already exists except to create a new user if needed. Remember, all the installers do is optionally format the drives, mount them then install files into those drives. If you skip the formatting and manually do that partitioning (or using an existing partition layout) it will still mount and write to the same places regardless of it they are separate partitions or not. So a separate partition does not add any extra protection to your home files at all.

But regardless of what you do you should ALWAYS backup your home data anyway. Even with separate partitions or subvolumes the installer can touch or delete anything it wants to and you can easily click the wrong button or accidentally wipe thing. At most preserving your home saves you from restoring from a backup it should not be done instead of backup.

There is no problem with having home on a different disk. But why do you want swap on the slower disk? These would benefit from being on the faster disks. Same with all the system binaries.

Personally I would put as much as possible on the faster disk and mount the slower somewhere that the speed matters less. Like for photos/videos in your home dir.

/boot can be anywhere though if you are getting a grub error that suggests the UEFI firmware is finding grubs first stage but grub is having issues after that. Personally I don’t use grub anymore, systemd-boot is far simpler as it does not need to deal with legacy MBR booting.

Most packages managers can run arbitrary code on install or upgrade or removal. You are trusting the code you choose to run on your system no matter where you get it from. Remember the old bug in ubuntu that ran a rm -rf / usr/.. instead of rm -rf /usr/... and wiped a load of peoples systems?

Flatpacks, Apparmor and snaps are better in this reguard as they are somewhat more sandboxed and can restrict what the applications have access to.

But really if the install script is from the authors of the package then it should be just as trustworthy as the package. But generally I download and read the install scripts as there is no standard they are following and I don’t want them touching random system files in ways I am not aware of or cannot undo easily. Sometimes they are just detecting the OS and picking relevant packages to install - maybe with some thrid party repos. Other times they mess with your home partition and do a bunch of stuff including messing with bashrc files to add things to your PATH which I don’t like. I would never run a install script that is not from the author of the application though and be very wary of install scripts from a smaller package with fewer users.

Also if you are looking for a replacement for find that is not a full tui then take a look at fd which works more like what the author expected from the find commad - fd <pattern>.

My point is the different levels of just working are subjective, not objective. I personally have spent far more time fixing bugs or just reinstalling ubuntu systems then I have over the same period for Arch systems. So many of my ubuntu installs just ended up breaking after a while where I have had the same Arch install on systems for 5+ years now. Could never get a Ubuntu system to last more then a year.

Everyone has different stories about the different OSs. It is all subjective.

You can cherry-pick examples of problems from every OS. That is my point. They all have issues that you may or may not encounter and quite a few that would make people from other OSs scratch their head and think what the hell the devs are thinking. Pointing out one issue of one OS does not change any of that.

Which is proven by the other replys to your comment - others dont find this issue to be as show stopping as you do and just live with it or dont use it at all. How many issues do you do the same for on your favorite OS?

There is no perfect OS that just works for everyone. They are all software so they all have bugs. People how say an OS just works have never hit those bugs or have gotten used to fixing/working around or flat out ignoring them.

This is true of all OSs, including Windows, Linux and MacOS. They are all differently buggy messes.

Linux is the buggy mess that works best for me though.

Though the constant resistance from people like Hellwig were part of the reason for that burn out, though not the only reason.

From their blog post:

Finally, subjectively, C++ isn’t drawing in the crowds. We have never had a lot of C++ contributors. Over the 11 years fish used C++, only 17 people have at least 10 commits to the C++ code. We also don’t know a lot of people who would love to work on a C++ codebase in their free time.

Hard to tank when you don’t have many to begin with. Rust is far nicer to new users to contribute to then old C++ code. Which can be seen in their github - in the last 24 months 16 people have contributed more then 10 commits. Which is during the conversion period - I dont expect that many of those to be C++ contributions. So rust does not seem to have hurt their contributions at all and in fact looks to have helped.

That is not true though. The vast majority of people are people that don’t do much on their systems at all. Maybe look at Facebook or a few sites, write the occasional document or email and maybe play a few simple games. The type of people that have never heard of Linux or even know what an OS is let alone able to switch to another one. Those types of people will be perfectly happy on Linux if it came pre installed.

The people switching ATM and having issues are the highly technical people that have far more complex requirements and for those it does depend on the person and what they need to do.

The low percentage of users is not a sign of of it not being ready, just the sheer marketing and effort Microsoft has put into making windows the default option.

Might I add the idea that your terminal emulator must support your shell is utterly ridiculous?

TBH I am starting to come around to the idea of a tightly integrated shell and terminal emulator support. There are just things you cannot do with these being separate things. I am very tempted to explore the idea from the other end though - writing a shell that has a emulator built into it (like screen/tmux basically are). But I do think that this integration is needed for any per command features that is not just printing out a prompt.

It would be interesting to see what could be done with this type of integration but will likely break support for existing shells. Unless you maybe launch a shell for each command you run or something 🤔. Would like to seem more people experimenting with stuff like this and see what new things we could drive forward. We have been stuck with the current tty system since like the 80s to support devices that just dont exist anymore.