* Rolling releases which mostly doesn't break things
* Solid package management
* Doesn't handhold too much, while still not being too much of a pain to get a desktop going
* Doesn't start services because you install them (Debian/Ubuntu)
* Doesn't try and force snaps and an essentially proprietary store on you (Ubuntu)
* Still popular enough to have momentum behind it (problems are Google-able)
* systemd. It's almost a necessary evil at this point, but not quite
It's been pretty smooth sailing just a few slight quirks you need to keep in mind. Would suggest checking it out if you get a chance.
I don't find it terribly difficult, but maybe I am biased here, because I am a Debian Developer, so I work on Debian packages pretty often and know it well enough. It's true that packages can be very heterogeneous for many reasons.
That said, again I love debian, its stability and high quality, and thanks to you and the volunteers who make it that way :)
On the other hand, there are reasons for scepticism towards proposals of forcing a uniform style. If such policies were accepted, they would have accepted years ago, so we would now be stuck with packages on SVN, much cruder tooling, etc. Back then SVN was really the future. What will be the future in ten years? We don't know, and that's the reason why we want to be sure that we'll be still free to move to it when it will arrive.
(and, BTW, of course you can change your SVN policy, but then you have to update all at once 30k+ source packages and the habits of 1k+ developers, not really easy)
Not to be meant as a rant, just an explanation for the current situation.
> That said, again I love debian, its stability and high quality, and thanks to you and the volunteers who make it that way :)
Thanks to you for your support!
AUR can be used to install git version of software and configure them to your liking. For example, I run Emacs, rebuilt every month or so, that's directly from the most recent commits. Arch Linux makes it really easy to compile any package from source and configure how you would like (change gcc optimization level, compile in optional features, etc).
Pacman (the package manager) is also a lot faster and full featured than Debian. Everything just works.. better. And with the AUR, Arch Linux undoubtedly has more packages than any other distro. And the packages aren't ancient, either.
Another plus is that Arch Linux includes all development headers with the main package. In Debian you have install a special dev pack, which I think is pretty stupid.
For desktop I’ve settled on Arch and it’s been smooth sailing for over ten years. The package management is vastly superior to ubuntu/debian and most mainstream distros. As a software developer, I often need recent mainline releases of major compinents like gcc/clang and other such libraries. Other distros force me to manage these manually and tend to have bad packaging conventions.
For server, I tend to do whatever is the “default” of the cloud provider I am working with as they tend to be tested the most and get security patches the quickest.