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by Mond_ 116 days ago
I used Manjaro for a few years.

That's how I learned a pretty important lesson about software engineering that still informs how I work to this day.

"A layer of abstraction on top of a stateful legacy system often doesn't result in a simpler system, it just introduces exciting new failure possibilities. This especially applies when the owners of the legacy system have no responsibility over the abstraction layer."

3 comments

This comment made a lot more sense to me once I realized we weren't talking about an aggressively marketed weight loss drug.
It's still true. Your metabolic system is probably not simpler after taking terzepatide. Although, just because it's not simpler doesn't mean it can't be better. I'm very glad for the C++ abstraction layer over assembly, even if the stack is more complicated than if it were just assembly
The word "legacy" doesn't seem needed there.
Can you explain it for those out of the loop?
Manjaro sells itself as "Arch, but more approachable". In reality, you'll often end up with "Arch, but with additional weird package management upgrade issues that are a byproduct of Manjaro's own repositories interacting with the arch on your system."

Instead of just having to track the arch repos, you suddenly have those and Manjaro's own stuff (and own package manager tool etc.), which is another point of failure. Every new bit of technology is another part that can fail.