Are you just using the last release of Yuzu or something? I’ve become relatively keen to emulate my Switch games on Steam Deck because it’s just so much more comfortable to hold, at least for me.

…I need to stop giving Nintendo money.

Fedora’s always run really sluggishly for me on whatever hardware I’ve tried it on, so I don’t recommend it in general because my personal experience with it hasn’t been great.

Even ignoring this, I’m not sure I’d recommend it for beginners due to how it tends to jump on the latest hip new software. For some users this is a massive point in Fedora’s favour, but I’m not sure how much I’d trust a beginner to, say, maintain a BTRFS filesystem properly. Not to mention the unlikely, but still present, possibility of issues caused by such new software.

…this looks like it was written by a supervisor who has no idea what AI actually is, but desperately wants it shoehorned into the next project because it’s the latest buzzword.

Gamedevs would prefer that one pirate the game outright than use shady key resellers.

Fedora was never that great to begin with

I always just found it to be really, really, ridiculously slow. I swear DNF might rival Windows in terms of update slowness and it seems to permeate the whole system.

While I admit that the timing with Red Hat’s closed-sourcing is really bad, and I’m also going to start avoiding Fedora for the same reason, saying that opt-in telemetry (that one can literally read the source code of) is “putting dollars first” is really dumb. Do you think the same about Debian’s popularity-contest, which has existed since 2004?

This really depends on your definition of “stability”.

The technical definition is “software packages don’t change very often”. This is what makes Debian a “stable” distro, and Arch an “unstable” one.

The more colloquial definition of “stability” is “doesn’t break very often”, which is what people usually mean when they ask for “stable” distributions. The main problem with recommending a distro like this, is that it’s going to depend on you as a user, and also on your hardware.

I, personally, have used Arch for about 5 years now, and it’s only ever broken because I’ve done something stupid. I stopped doing stupid things, and Arch hasn’t broken since. However, I’ve also spoken to a few people who have had Arch break on them, but 9 times out of 10, they point to the Nvidia driver as the culprit, so it seems you’ll have a better time if you have an AMD GPU, for example.

such as the GUI installer pamac allowing unsuspecting users to trivially install unvetted packages from the AUR without even a clear indication they may be dangerous

Unless something has changed since the last time I used Manjaro, this isn’t actually true. You have to go relatively deep into Pamac’s settings menu to enable AUR packages, and when you do, a popup comes up telling you what the AUR is and why it might be dangerous (although iirc, it neglects to tell you that an extra reason is Manjaro packages being out of date).

Not that I’m pro-Manjaro, for all the other reasons you’ve given.

Manjaro was my intro to Linux, but now that I know more about it, I can’t recommend it in good conscience. Letting their SSL certs expire is something that happens (even though they could automate it), but telling their users to change their clocks so it works is a big no-no.

Worse than that is how they manage packages from upstream. Simply freezing them for two weeks is, in my opinion, the worst of both worlds. You don’t get timely security updates, but you still end up with the issues of being on the bleeding edge - just late. It also means that if you use the AUR (which is really one of the biggest perks of Arch-based systems), it’s possible that the necessary dependencies are out of date.

I think that if one wants “Arch with an installer” they should go with EndeavourOS, or try the archinstall script.

Arch.

I’ve done a reasonable amount of distrohopping, but I always come crawling back because I’ve never found anything that can compete with the AUR.