sorry if my reply seemed too negative towards you. I was mostly curious about the issues you had and sorting them out... It's good you enjoy it! like I said, I think for specific people... these types of issues are much more interesting than dealing with issues that come with other platforms.

I wonder if your system update/hyprland issue was when they moved away from wlroots?

AUR isn't really recommended. Because it's managed by users, you're essentially running install scripts that may or may not be maintained by randos (of course, i'm simplifying--but i think this is a fair way to look at it). Personally, if possible I'll always choose flatpak > AUR--and AUR only when necessary. That being said, I do install from the AUR, and I love that it exists and is available... I just avoid it when possible.

Updating once a year is rough. But even then with your issues, imo i'd weigh those to how difficult a windows update for 10 -> 11 or going from Debian 12 -> 13... If I was only using my computer once a month or so, I'd likely run Debian. But I do have a second laptop that I rarely use, but it runs arch with DWM and almost nothing else GUI besides a web browser and "it just works"... even after a month or so there isn't much to updated, cause it only has like 500 or packages installed lol

if you haven't already, i recommend maybe trying to set up a systemd timer for refreshing reflector? I run it manually whenever I find that downloading updates is slow or fails... in the past I had a bash script in my $PATH called update.sh that would run reflector, run yay, and then update flatpak (I put it in my $PATH, because at the time I was testing the water with different shells, and didn't want to have to update .bashrc, .zshrc and fish config etc).

bummer that you've had issues with arch. but i don't really understand the issues you've had. like setting up reflector should solve the mirrors, and checking the newsfeed before updating will solve a lot of other issues. In the last year I think there was only one, maybe two times that there was manual intervention required from me--and they were both trivial; and the convenience of never having to worry about doing a distro upgrade is so nice... Other than that, hyprland is changing frequently so sometimes you need to update your config--but again, just read the release notes or use a wm that updates less (like sway, dwm). But the changes have never taken more than 20 seconds to fix, and they've never been breaking for me. Maybe some of your issues were due to the DDOS attacks that have been going on? Also how much do you use the AUR?

My take on Arch after almost a year is that you have to either be super good at Linux, or be nerdy enough to waste time on Linux nonsense and menial maintenance tasks.

while i think this is overstated, i do agree that you need to be a certain kind of person to enjoy arch.

true. but in my experience, most code redemption downloads don't require info though... besides the usual collection of your data via fingerprinting and cookies.

where do you source most of your music? for music i really only pirate large artists/bands, so torrenting is pretty easy. i haven't bothered with soulseek--a centralized network doesn't appeal that much, and i'm not desperate. if i really need something, and can't find it, i just use yt-dlp.

this sounds nasty... how recent? i haven't experienced any issues using calibre to strip drm and back up books from my kobos. works for library books from overdrive/libby as well. from my cursory glance, it seems like they have been using ADE linkfiles for this for a while? But maybe I didn't look closely enough.

I love my kobo so much, and I love being able to own my digitial books, keep back ups and not have to deal with DRM (once removed lmao).

are you only a windows user? what is keeping you there? what is keeping you from moving to linux? one thing that is wild for me, especially when it comes to technical users--is that holding onto windows, and dealing with the windows work arounds is often more complicated or tedious than dealing with linux's quirks--which to be fair, there are a lot of quirks, but it feels different when the quirks are well documented and it's more a process of learning. to me, windows feels like you're fumbling around in a dark room, and someone is moving around the furniture every 3 months.

I use a flip phone as a daily driver, and do not have any banking apps--and things are just getting harder and harder. I primarily do my banking on my laptop, but I do have an old pixel phone with GrapheneOS that plug in and charge when I "need" a smart phone.

Most banking apps need the banking app installed to a smart phone because MFA is handled through the banks proprietary app. Some banking apps aren't even possible to install on GrapheneOS due to the app requiring google play integrity API--making these banks impossible for me to use.

I use three banks, one works perfectly and supports traditional 2fa totp--which is seamless for me. My second bank supports MFA through their app, and will fallback to SMS 2fa--less good, still relatively convenient (i hate using my phone, having to find it etc), but also much less secure. The third bank (which I may drop) only supports MFA through the app, but still supports graphene. This is more secure than the second bank, but a huge pain to have to charge my smart phone, and go through the process.

Banks are not incentivized to have web/computer access be painless. It feels like soon we may not be able to bank without paying for spyware.

...wait.... you aren't paying your monthly antifa membership dues?