

And yet, there are several distributions based on Arch designed to ease Arch installation and usage. Installing EndeavourOS is hardly any more work than installing Mint. If you’re using KDE, and install bauh
, you can use Arch and barely be aware that it’s supposed to be a snooty, technical distribution.
The distro leaders can do whatever they want. I think it’s a bad decision by Arch - I call bullshit on the “we can’t detect” statement, because you can absolutely test for whether X is installed in a PKGBUILD - and as a community contributor, I object to it. It’s intentionally exclusionary and at a time when many people still have issues with Wayland being incomplete and outright broken for some cases.
That’s a weird statement. Why? I browse the web frequently from terminals and the console. If you need a GUI so badly you have to boot from a live USB to answer questions, that’s you. I use live USBs on the rare occasion I screw up my boot loader, like when I swapped hard drives and didn’t catch all of the places device block IDs are referenced in the boot process.
Anyway, it’s weird to argue both that Arch Linux users should be expert shell users, but also that they should use a different distro if they’re capable of using Linux entirely without a GUI.
Several Arch-based distros are blurring the line between the self-rarified progenators of the “I use Arch, BTW” meme and non-technical users, by making it easier to install and maintain Arch. I absolutely agree that what these forks do is not the responsibility of core Arch, but I do expect a modicum of effort, the bare consideration to not intentionally making things harder for users than they need to be; to avoid actively breaking systems, where they can.
A release note is a sloppy answer when it’s almost trivial to avoid causing the breakage in the first place.