[pkulak]

I've been on Arch a couple years now; before that MacOS. I'd say things break about as often as they did on MacOS. Maybe once a year. It's not like MacOS with Homebrew and a few dozen developer tools is bulletproof. But at least on Arch you are able to understand your own system and have half a chance of fixing things.

You're totally right about the real joy being in "getting your custom stack". On Arch, for one example, installing Docker is just "sudo pacman -S docker". On Mac you get a web page, "Docker Desktop" and a tray icon to look at for the rest of your life. On Arch everything is just so much easier.