Linux

I guess I just don’t expect most beginners to want to read the breaking changes. Like when firmware packages recently changed, pacman paru yay and octopi don’t tell you about those breaking changes. You just get an error when you try to update. If you read the notes, you know to uninstall the old package, install the new ones, problem solved. What about using meld to merge pacnew? I don’t expect someone in their first week of Linux to figure it out. Even if they can learn it, I don’t expect a lot of users to want to.

Maybe I need to have more faith in people? I stuck to Ubuntu derived distros for about a year before I took on Fedora, and then eventually EndeavourOS where I learned the ins and outs of managing an Arch based system. I learned a lot, and I learned it gradually, which worked well for me, so I don’t try to throw other new users in the deep end of the pool.

The ideas that Arch is scary and too complex are dated at this point with how some of these modern distros are packaged.

I get where you're hinting at and its difficulty is definitely overblown in the sense that some newbies may actually thrive on Arch. Thus, if anything, I'd propose that (very) eager-to-learn newbies should perhaps even consider Arch.

However, as long as this convoluted mess continues to be the expected 'workflow' for updates^[Let's not ignore that Arch expects you to update regularly.], Arch can not be considered beginner-friendly.

By contrast, a distro like Bazzite just defaults to care-free^[To be fair, if you've layered anything, then that might have compromised the integrity of upgrades. That being said, it's a minor concern that mostly seems to be affect major system updates only. So that would mean you'd have to pay a bit more attention once every 6 months or so. Which, at least IMO, is very sane. And -again- only applies if you've actually layered stuff. It's smooth sailing otherwise] auto-updates in the background; a pattern every noob recognizes from their phones.