I find my system usually has to wait 90 seconds to kill KDE plasma when I use it without a login manager and then try to shut down…

Yeah, it was working fine but then it got really hard to use pulse. Just when it was stable, we get a few good years before having to switch to a new unstable thing, since pulse lost support.

I never had this until pipewire

I like to edit configs, which can break apt, and build projects from source, which requires bleeding-edge versions of many libraries that most distros don’t ship with, which also tends to break apt when I manually install them.

Arch’s pacman gracefully handled modified configs and the Arch repos ship very new packages, so I don’t find myself fighting the OS.

For me it’s been Arch for the last several years. It’s the only distro that can deal with the weird things I do while still working well for daily use.

No, then you fix the code to work with your current system libraries and upstream the patch and version bump. This happens less on Arch, BTW ;-)

Not so much nowadays, but we remember!

GNOME sucks, both in their community engagement culture, and actual look. I’ve never liked their culture, but they used to have a superior desktop IMO.