"Oh it just works, as long as you read the documentation before every update and follow the update news feed, which usually has a bunch of information on packages your either don't use or don't care about. And you may have to fix shit manually. So yeah, it Just Works."

With Mint (or Mac OS or Windows or Ubuntu), it updates automatically. Or if it doesn't, it flashes an icon, I click the icon, it updates for me.

That's what "it just works" means.

a. There's no need to 'read the documentation' before every update a quick glance at the news feed will do.

b. macOS doesn't track and update every package on your system.

c. in that sense, nothing just works, i.e. had to repair Windows after a botched MS update quite a few times and while macOS is not usually completely broken after significant updates, (it shouldn't, they control the hw), it tends to be broken in subtle and annoying ways nonetheless, 10.7 for example was particularly bad.

d. That Ubuntu just works is your experience, there are plenty of people who try it and it either cannot detect something, or the GPU driver is broken or Wifi doesn't work, (see the reports on that regarding 16.04 LTS) etc. so it is very subjective, but if you don't experience these issues with Ubuntu, it's great. All I'm saying is that it is the same way for Arch.

"a. There's no need to 'read the documentation' before every update a quick glance at the news feed will do."

That is part of the documentation. Users shouldn't have to subscribe to a news feeds in order to correctly update their systems. Do you subscribe to Microsoft's or Apple's update news feed? If you do, you're unlike 99.999% of users.

"b. macOS doesn't track and update every package on your system."

Mint does. Ubuntu does. A large number of other desktop-oriented distros do, without requiring their users to read news feeds for instructions on manual procedures.

"c. in that sense, nothing just works, i.e. had to repair Windows after a botched MS update quite a few times and while macOS is not usually completely broken after significant updates, (it shouldn't, they control the hw), it tends to be broken in subtle and annoying ways nonetheless, 10.7 for example was particularly bad."

Shit happens. Shit just seems to happen a lot more often on Arch (and Gentoo, for that matter).

"d. That Ubuntu just works is your experience, there are plenty of people who try it and it either cannot detect something, or the GPU driver is broken or Wifi doesn't work, (see the reports on that regarding 16.04 LTS) etc. so it is very subjective, but if you don't experience these issues with Ubuntu, it's great. All I'm saying is that it is the same way for Arch."

I used Arch for ~9 years. I've had systems where it worked fine, and systems that required a lot of fiddling to work.

In contrast, Mint and Ubuntu has worked flawlessly, on those same systems.

But the perception that "shit happens way more on Arch or Gentoo" is your subjective opinion, because that's how it happened to you, others see it differently, I still remember the very first Ubuntu I've tried (6.10) being garbage on my hw compared to Mandrake, but that didn't seem to be the case for a lot of people evidently since it became so popular.

There are a lot more updates on Arch that require manual actions to be taken in order to work correctly, when compared to Mint or Ubuntu.

Similarly, the config file merging process on Arch is basically 100% manual (I know pacdiff makes it a little easier, but still).

> There are a lot more updates on Arch that require manual actions to be taken in order to work correctly, when compared to Mint or Ubuntu.

There's more, but I don't think a lot more. Also, if the automatic config in Ubuntu fails you, it's a lot harder to get in and manually override their settings.

When's the last time you had to read documentation to update your Mac? To most people "it just works" means crash free and hassle free, i.e. your grandma can use it. I never said it was inappropriate for Apple, though it was often implied competetitors don't "just work".