> [Arch is a v]ery nice OS for server stuff if you're brave enough to wrangle pacman.

if you're running a homelab and regularly 'wrangling' a package manager which is broken/incomplete by design, why are you choosing distros based on package availability rather than on the quality of the tooling? surely you can package anything you need to use

I could, but the time I'd spend getting it working on a stable distro vastly outweighs the time I'd spend setting up my pacman.conf and backing it up to git. When I say 'wrangle', I'm more talking about the instability and frequency of updates. It's definitely only for homelab use, I wouldn't ever consider deploying this on a larger scale.

I guess preexisting availability is important when you don't know what you'll want to use, and you're also interested in trying a lot of things that you may not want to keep around for long