[squarefoot]

I get your point:) Many among the users I introduced to Linux are elderly with no or little computer experience, and others just need it for the usual web+office+media applications, so having a very consistent desktop where everything works out of the box as in Manjaro beats the incredible number of packages available on Debian. This is about XFCE of course, which is what I install: close enough to Windows to be useable by all, simple enough not to balk at the first inconsistence, fast enough to run pretty much everywhere. Gnome, Mate and KDE would probably be fantastic on all Distros, but XFCE on Debian defaults to ugly and unnecessary settings (a DM ideal for small screen laptops which defaults to two panels?). I don't have experience with plain Arch, but having read only good things about it will probably try it soon.

Debian has been really good for just about everything since I moved to it many moons ago, and as of today is still my daily driver on all machines, but sometimes requires constant fiddling here and there, and I'm getting old; I stopped recompiling my kernels on PCs over 10 years ago, and a system that works just out of the box is too temping:) Not to criticize Debian, which has been great almost everywhere, but it gave some problems with some niche applications, for example music: a working LinVST installation is not easy to obtain, and it is tightly tied with the running kernel, which if has _rt extensions will help with low latency but sometimes doesn't let one compile with standard Wine libraries, and when one finds a good compromise, bang! VirtualBox stops working because now its kernel module doesn't build anymore. Grrrr!:) So I may take the chance to test some other options, and Arch might be a good candidate.