> the 'originals' work always better in the long run
Except that normal people can actually install Manjaro and it doesn't make you use AUR for pretty basic things. Except that Ubuntu actually doesn't shit itself almost every time you add a 3rd party package/repo and comes with reasonable defaults. Also, have you used Pop OS?
> Except that Ubuntu actually doesn't shit itself almost every time you add a 3rd party package/repo and comes with reasonable defaults.
I'm using debian testing for more than 15 years and it never shit itself for a 3rd party repo.
Debian comes with whathever the original software developers set as the default sans the wallpaper. For sensible default you can bug the software developer in question, not debian.
Maybe the situation is different on the server side or I've just been extremely unlucky, but I keep getting my packages broken. Just a few days ago I was installing Wireguard on a Stretch system (added unstable repo, lowest priority, pinned packages) and APT got tangled up to the point where I couldn't install almost anything because one package was too new, but trying to remove it went down the dependency tree all the way to `util-linux` and I had to do surgery with `dpkg -r --force-depends` to fix it.
On the server side, I only use stable (due to security updates and other critical stuff). Using testing in three desktop systems (two at office, one at home) currently, all workstations which see regular, heavy usage.
To add unstable packages to a stable system with repo pinning and using apt directly is not the best practice though.
If I'm going to add stuff from unstable, I use aptitude. Its dependency resolution and solution suggestions are better and more manageable than ordinary apt. It allows you what's going to happen before actually pulling the trigger.
The only package I get from unstable is firefox. I add the repo, update the package and remove the repo afterwards because unstable and experimental are highly chaotic realms and not suitable to use continuously due to high rate of uncontrolled change. Also unstable and experimental are not guaranteed to not to break. Testing and stable are implicitly (testing) and explicitly (stable) is guaranteed to work.
With this recipe, I only had to re-install a Debian system once; to migrate it from 32 to 64 bits since a very big disk cache with very small files was triggering a bug causing disks to trash and system slow down to a crawl. There were no procedures to migrate a 32 bit system to a 64 one in a reliable manner so, I just reinstalled it.
I've had a friend struggle with half a dozen Linux distributions. Then I told him about Arch Linux. One day later he told me he had a fully functioning Linux desktop.
I was impressed because usually when I install Arch Linux I forget to boot the flash drive with UEFI enabled so I get stuck because I get errors during bootloader installation. I also love to do pointless things like install Arch Linux (not the iso) on a 32GB flash drive.
Except that normal people can actually install Manjaro and it doesn't make you use AUR for pretty basic things. Except that Ubuntu actually doesn't shit itself almost every time you add a 3rd party package/repo and comes with reasonable defaults. Also, have you used Pop OS?
Your statement is quite simply untrue.