Even if I'm in a tech enthusiast group, I moved away from rolling distros to fedora - still getting fairly fresh things, but don't have to deal with lots of unnecessary updates installing every day. On work laptop I'm a major update of the system behind and every time I actually go for it, it means a few hours to a day of making the environment work again.
Somehow I magically am typing this on an LTS system with the latest usptream versions of Firefox, slack, discord, blender, vscode, libreoffice, OBS, spotify, golang, and node, all without PPAs or stackoverflow.
I get it you use Arch, but you should perhaps educate yourself on how other distros work before throwing shade?
...and a desktop OS, and a mobile OS. I don't see where it's optimized for one over the other.
> No PPAs; the AUR has everything.
I'm not fond of PPAs, but are they really that much worse than the AUR, which works by manually compiling software using unvetted scripts from strangers?
You still have the problem of being stuck with an LTS package list (and dealing with PPAs) though.
Also, out of scope of this convo, but this is about what is
>a standard ... desktop for general users
but what a modern desktop should look like for general users is a subjective or moving target. If it's something like Windows 10X[0] (sandbox containerize all the things), which I think it should be, then no Linux distro currently suffices at all. :D
0: https://www.howtogeek.com/442767/what-is-windows-10x-and-how...
It only has a limited set of old software. To get new software, you have to mess with weird (possible expired) PPAs sourced from StackOverflow posts. Eventually, you have to reinstall the OS to get new software packages or DE features.
This is fine for servers which need super-stable, tested packages.
But does that sound like a typical end-user OS, like Windows? No. That's why a better candidate are nerfed rolling releases like Manjaro. c: New stuff all the time, indefinitely. Nerfed rolling, so less bleeding edge breakage risk. No reinstalls. No PPAs; the AUR has everything. Great forum to boot. Also Arch Wiki compatible.