RE: https://social.linux.pizza/@midtsveen/115814515520798182
This is the hill I'm willing to die on. Picking your operating system matters so much more than your desktop environment. You can change how it looks a hundred times, but the foundation underneath decides whether your setup will thrive or break the moment you hit update. People love to slap a shiny theme on top of chaos and call it a day, only to wonder later why everything’s on fire.
You know the type, those who follow a random online guide word-for-word, only to realize their chosen distro is immutable or that the magical “apt install PACKAGE_NAME” doesn’t work. Suddenly, “pacman -Syu” is a mysterious incantation, and the panic sets in. That’s when the regret begins to simmer. Not because Linux failed them, but because they never understood what they installed in the first place.
If you can’t tell the difference between pacman, dnf, apt, or even Upkg, just install Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) and stop complaining. You’ll get stability, you’ll get simplicity, and you won’t have to pretend your life depends on which package manager looks cooler in the terminal. Pick something that works, learn what’s under the hood, and let the aesthetics come later.
Look, the desktop is just the paint job. What actually makes a distro itself is what’s under the hood, the systems philosophy, the package manager, and how it all fits together. People keep acting like wallpapers change performance or philosophy. They don’t. Choose your distro for how it works, not just how it looks, and maybe you’ll stop switching every two weeks.
My point is that you can make https://paldo.org look exactly like https://debian.org, and you can make https://archlinux.org look exactly like https://fedoraproject.org.