May be a mean sounding question, but I’m genuinely wondering why people would choose Arch/Endevour/whatever (NOT on steam hardware) over another all-in-one distro related to Fedora or Ubuntu. Is it shown that there are significant performance benefits to installing daemons and utilities à la carte? Is there something else I’m missing? Is it because arch users are enthusiasts that enjoy trying to optimize their system?
It works well for me.
Actually, I am a long-term Debian user (for 15 years) and use it in parallel with Arch, since about ten years, and I had less trouble with Arch: When upgrading from Debian 10 to 12, GNOME broke for me so that I could not log in any more. I spent a day or so to search for the cause - it is related to the user configuration but I could not figure out what it was and I had to time-box the effort, and switched to StumpWM (a tiling window manager, which I had been using before). I had no such problem with Arch, and on top of that I could just install GNOME’s PaperWM extension just to give it a try.
You could argue that my failure to upgrade was GNOME’s fault, not Debians, and in a way this is true. Especially, GNOME should not hide configuration in inscrutinable unreadable files, and of course it should parse for errors coming from backwards-compatible breaking changes.
But the thing is, for software making many small changes is very often much easier than a few big changes. For example because it is far easier to narrow down the source of a problem. So, it is likely that GNOME on Arch had the same problem between minor upgrades, and fixed it without much fuss.
But you also need to see that Arch is primarily a Desktop/end user system, while Debian is, for example, also a server system. Debian is designed for a far larger range of applications and purposes, and having many small breaking upgrades would likely not work well for these.