Here comes the expected complaint: Ubuntu is supposed to be the user friendly distro, right?
It seems an unfair thing to say until you experience it, or your loved one does. My SO uses gnome-ubuntu, and I am at a loss to explain why firefox crashes multiple times a week on her PC. On my gentoo box? I think the browser hasn't crashed randomly in...months? And I am on ~arch at least for firefox so they are the same version afaik.
Gentoo doesn't have as many devoted, paid testers from what I understand as Canonical does, so how is their stability relatively worse?
I actually put Arch on my SOs laptop, because I knew that Ubuntu would probably break in some way in a couple of months. But I'd probably go with openSUSE if I needed to reinstall GNU/Linux (the community has put a lot of work into stability as well as having up to date software).
Does arch have something like Software in their gnome 3? My SO isn't as into tech stuff and I wanted it to be easier for them to install stuff without having to google or know apt/emerge/pacman
Yeah, there's front-ends for pacman. They're usually ... okay. The only issue is that you usually need to install stuff from the AUR (which won't ever get updated by default unless your GUI supports yaourt).
How necessary is it to have a separate /boot partition these days though? I have one because my root is LUKS-encrypted, but I think Grub could handle booting from an unencrypted ext4 root. I guess it would still fill up eventually, but maybe not before a re-install for other reasons.
Grub can actually handle booting from an encrypted ext4 root as well, no /boot needed. You do end up entering the password twice by default, but that can be dealt with by using a key file.
The UEFI system partition is mounted at /boot/efi. /boot itself can be a regular filesystem, or part of the root filesystem if you have no unusual requirements.
For maintainability, you might want to consider using /etc/crontab or /etc/cron.d or /etc/cron.daily to store this instead of the root user cron. Especially on servers.
Given that the original title "Refresh hangs indefinitely, appstreamcli using 100% CPU" wouldn't probably have made the front page, yes, I'd say it has been editorialised for added sensationalism, like "failing all over the world"
For me, that is not accurate. If OP wanted to give a bit more context other than the original title, they could have changed it without adding the sensationalist part, for example, "Ubuntu bug breaks apt-get update" or similar.
This afternoon, without applying any of the workaround fixes, I somehow was able to apt update and upgrade appstream. Did they somehow make a server-side fix?