All your points are valid, and I agree with most of them except maybe advising people to use Testing ;)
From a security point of view, Testing is dead last in Debian’s vulnerabilities fix order of priorities after SID and Stable, and fixes in general except when the next release is being freezed. I’ve undergone breaking changes and regressions weekly on Testing, dependency issues that took forever to get fixed, and the year or so I’ve spent on Testing was miserable. Testing definitely has its purposes, but daily driving it on a laptop should not be one of them.
I understand the issues you’ve got concerning Flatpaks and how it goes against a distro’s philosophy, but I think, from a “normie”'s POV, it’s still miles better than the classic “download a random exe from a random website and never bother having to uninstall and reinstall it every week to keep it up-to-date” windows paradigm. Flatpaks are mainly a solution for developers and package maintainers (package once, distribute everywhere), but it benefits the end users. You get to use “the same version as everyone else”, always up-to-date whether you’re on Debian or on Arch, compiled against a known version of all dependencies so bug reports are more consistent and avoid weird distro-specific behaviors.
I’d advise against using flatpaks if you also have the software available in the debian repositories. Always use the package manager instead, when possible.
Please let me disagree on this. Debian + Flatpaks is actually an awesome combo. Rock solid and super stable base, up to date user facing apps.
Debian’s life cycle is awesome for core system stuff, it ensures that once your system runs perfectly, it’ll continue to run perfectly for several years without intervention despite always being up to date.
But for user facing apps, it’s actually really frustrating when you know there is a bug fix or a feature you need that’s been implemented and made available months ago but you’re stuck on a 2-year-old version.
I don’t think it’s heresy, but I always find it funny that an extremely vocal community shits on systemd for being a bloated tentacular monster shat should be abandoned, but praise X for being a bloated tentacular monster.
In a way, Wayland is much closer to the Unix Philosophy than X. It’s a display protocol, nothing more. Everything else should be implemented by the applications using this protocol. X has grown over the decades to include way too many features and edge cases.
Translation layers like XWayland are important and extremely useful for the transition period, but shouldn’t be taken as a sign that Wayland is not ready for prime time. If 10% the people shitting on Wayland had instead worked on adding Wayland functionality to their favorite apps (that includes you fuckers at nVidia), the transition would have ended years ago.
The linear regulators are still there. It’s the rectifier that gets replaced. I guess the main difference in the power side is the high frequency noise of the switching PSUs vs the low frequency ripple of the rectifier, I’m not 100% sure if 7x12s are immune to them at least at audio frequencies.
I have updated Debian across 4 major releases without issues. I have daily updates on Fedora without issues. I had to do maintenance probably monthly on Manjaro.
Arch doesn’t do things for you, therefore Manjaro doesn’t do things for you. This means you are the one who needs to do the maintenance and upgrade config files and such. It is interesting, it is formative, but it is not for beginners who might get the impression that Linux needs constant maintenance and breaks often.