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?
I agree with you on the “stability” of frequent small changes vs infrequent huge ones (release upgrades on distros like Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora).
However, I have had multiple Arch installs where I have not used the system for multiple years (eg. old laptops, dormant VMs). Other than having to know how to update the keyring to get current GPG keys, Arch has always upgraded flawlessly for me. I have had upgrades that downloaded close to 3 GB all at once with a single pacman command (or maybe yay) that “just worked”.