There's definitively more to a distro than the shell prompt and wallpaper.
Besides the obvious package repos and how well package interoperability is maintained, there's also differences for default configuration. OpenSUSE offers sane options for security OOtB, IMO.
Then there's also linux itself. Some distros build the default kernel package with a set of patches to improve typical usability, while others just ship an untouched upstream version. Some offer alternatives while others don't.
More bloat from flatpak overhead :^)
That's not what they, or the stats, said. You can use chatgpt without plagiarizing, just like how you can use wikipedia without copy-pasting the whole article.
I meant for all packages. But when it comes to the actual details on how to do it, I'm not super sure. I know pacman is pretty sophisticated so it might support querying the package repo (or local package db) somehow. I would start by looking up the -F option.
I would start by looking at what files are included. There's the obvious .desktop entry, but also checking if there are any files put into /bin/, /usr/bin/, /usr/sbin/ etc. should suffice.
If you consider some of these packages as "dependencies" then look at if anything depends on it. But there are application-packages that others depend on, such as coreutils.
I'm a simple man, I just search directly in qbittorrent.
Interesting! I used arch for about 2 years on my gaming rig and it worked fine but I was worried if he went with something based on Arch that he would eventually run into issues due to not properly maintaining it (avoiding partial upgrades for example). But I'm probably overthinking it. If he sticks to a GUI for installing and updating packages and avoid messing with the terminal initially it should be fine.
I will add EndeavourOS to a small list of recommendations (rolling vs point release) so he can decide for himself.
What distro did you go with? My friend is showing intrest in trying Linux but I'm not sure what to recommend him. I use more advanced distros myself but I want it to work well for him OOtB while also not requiring any tinkering. I'm think of either some ubuntu-flavour or fork, like Kubuntu or maybe Mint.
I use debian 12 on my work laptop. I agree with your points but I still use it because I want the fundamental system to be stable, and then any software I want to be more up-to-date I build from source (tmux, alacritty, neovim) or download separately (vscode/slack/joplin).
I used to use ubuntu because it worked so well with my hardware ootb, but I got tired of snap.
I will sound really nit-picky buy the biggest thing keeping me away from using KDE is that accent-colored bar on each window in the taskbar, and the different coloring of open/focused/minimized windows. I want it sleek but not cluttery.
I've tried about a dozen themes but I couldn't find any that got rid of that and looked good. I tried fixing it myself but editing svg files was too difficult for me.
I hope plasma 6 adds more options for this but I'm not holding my breath.
Depends on the devs but I reckon they won't use the API.
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