I see French bloated my system to the fullest!

The easiest way would be getting the cheapest SSD (even 30 GB is enough for most distros), swap your current disk with it, play around, and return where you were, if you don’t like anything.

It was today when I first heard of it!

Using Arch for ~7 years or so! Both servers and desktops. Always just manually vimdiff’ed things.

I cannot count the number of times Debian Upgrade broke on me. My memory tells me I had issues with all upgrades (on various machines with mostly defaults) since Debian 8. It’s 13 now. I did follow the correct upgrade process and quite familiar with it, yet every single time I had issues at least for some of the desktops of my elder relatives and friends that I managed. Arch was just stable. And manual intervention is usually needed only if you have this particular thing installed. So, quite seldom. For servers, I think that was much better for me, but now I’m either Arch or Fedora (for situations where I don’t bother with setting my personal environment).

I have reinstalled Arch on the same machine only once, after SSD of my super old MacBook Air got corrupted. I haven’t used the laptop for like five years. Weirdly, a reinstall went well, and it looks like the SSD works well so far. Apart from that, my oldest system is about 7 years old, and it’s running well. I have no reason to reinstall. That very machine is a server. Also, I had a MacBook Pro broke keyboard on me, I simply rsynced my entire system to another MacBook Pro, and was done within about two hours. Needed to update /etc/fstab and maybe something else too. So, apart from Arch becoming a bit of a meme, I cannot recommend it more. It taught me quite a lot too. It was mostly stable for me.

Apparently, it’s dangerous to mention Arch— but I’d dare to do just that!

That sounds quite good, actually. I mean, I have a gazillion bash scripts, but I can keep them. I think I don’t care about posix, or whatever it’s called, for my day-to-day navigating the shell.

I tried to learn it, but failed. Looks like I’d love to use both, but I have no idea where to start. Any suggestions?