Me too.

8.10 was the last good Ubuntu. (It also had the best default wallpaper ever)

If you look at the “improvements” in every release since, you’ll notice that shit like they do currently isn’t an accident:

9.04 integrated web services into the main user interface.
9.10 integrated Ubuntu One (Ubuntu’s OneDrive, upgradable for money) by default and introduced the slooooow Ubuntu Software Center
10.04 integrated an interface to post on social media
10.10 added app purchases in the Software Center
11.04 made Unity the default
11.10 removed Gnome as fallback to Unity
12.04 introduced the buggy HUD
12.10 added the famous Amazon ad lense to it by default

and it goes on like this…

Read my comment again:

install Firefox from FlatPak
the Mozilla repo
or from source

In none of these cases will Ubuntu be able to install it from snap instead.
Only the Firefox “package” in the Ubuntu repos actually just links to a script that installs the snap.

Arch is so great, bro! The AUR has everything!
With yay, it’s so easy, bro!
Update Arch
yay breaks
stays broken for days

Any other distro that had a broken package manager for 3 days, ever?

when I don’t have a choice and I am being forced to use what the distro maintainers think is good for me.

That’s the case on literally any distro.
And just like on literally any distro, you can also install Firefox from FlatPak, the Mozilla repo or from source.

Of course. No other distro existed when Jesus was alive.

a really nice one, like 1K euros plus

1K is below entry level for a decent adult bicycle nowadays.

Be the lack of change you want to see in the world!

RebeccaBlackOS > Hannah Montana Linux

switch to Slackware
tell everyone
feel superior to billions of Arch users
occasionally drop a “Linux has become much too easy nowadays”

Checkmate, Satan. Praised be Bob!

Endeavour is great but it’s not simply Arch with an installer. Quite a few things are configured differently under the hood.

I chose the hard way to disable it back then, and switched to Debian.

It was just a package you could uninstall.

It isn’t even connected to anything

bro you need to upgrade to Ubuntu Pro!

KDE for desktops with a mouse, Gnome for laptops with a touchpad. Both are great!

I looked behind the scenes quite a bit in Debian and what you say mirrors what I saw. The project is very political and does suffer from a serious lack of man-(and woman-)power in many areas. If you do want to help, you’re almost immediately hampered by the community’s Byzantine structure.

If that puts you off, Arch is a more dynamic project that’s easier to get into as a maintainer. But it’s also organized with a more hierarchical and less democratic structure.

Additionally, you’ll find the issues Debian has all over the FOSS world (The Linux kernel is especially bad). And if you work in corporate IT like I do, you’ll soon notice that proprietary software organisations are no better. There’s software many people depend on maintained by a single overworked and struggling person everywhere you look. Yet it still works somehow. Cause wherever there is demand, a solution is found. And Debian at least has a long-established structure with the goal of finding that solution, even though it’s antiquated.

Tumbleweed includes the YaST package manager with all the repository priority settings that make sense in Leap, but the TW documentation tells you not to use it.
You can run zypper up which is a standard updating method in Leap, but the TW documentation tells you not to do that. More than half the zypper options make no sense in TW.
That’s the stuff I mean by “derivative”. They built on a Leap base and modified it into a rolling release.
If it was truly designed as a new, independent rolling release distro, they’d have taken those things out, packaged a different version of zypper or at least a different manpage.

Debian. I run Stable on servers and Unstable on desktops.
Although I do think OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Arch are actually better in many aspects, I find Tumbleweed too rough around the edges (it’s a derivative of Leap and that shows). And I just can’t be bothered to install and configure Arch anymore. Fedora and Ubuntu are too buggy on average, Mint is too “stable” for a desktop and I don’t use all the helpers that make it newbie-friendly. Slackware suffers from issues that were solved in the Linux world decades ago, and I dislike derivative distros on principle.

I’ve probably tried around 30-40 distros and I always return to Debian.

I’ve used Linux for 20 years now, and yes the experience was similar to back then.
But back then, there wasn’t a better FOSS option. Now there’s modern Linux.
Don’t get me wrong, I think BSD is a great system. It’s just not the right OS for a new-ish convertible laptop.