I feel like everyone goes through Ubuntu/Mint at some point :D I'm pretty sure Ubuntu was My First Distro(tm) way back in the early 2000s x_x
Think the hardest thing about Arch outside of the install ("they" don't seem to like people using archinstall but I think that's how most people install Arch, I have gotten J to do the partitioning because I can't always maths correctly, home goes on its own drive pretty much always, I'm starting to put srv on its own partition now after accidentally blowing away websites too many times and only just recently thought about putting things like tmp and local in their own partitions but it seems like a thing one would only do if pedantic) is that they really depise you using the software centres (at least they did back when I was using it) and just want you to pacman everything. I don't care as I command line my servers anyway (no gui) but I think it's unnecessarily hostile/unfriendly for normal users.
AUR is fine for the most part anyway as long as you don't install anything that clashes with a base package (my biggest paranoia) and you're only in there because there's stuff you want that isn't in the main repos or the one in the main repos won't do what you need.
Yay for rescuing the photos!
Really the only things I want to install are steam / gog / epic games, and Lutris does a pretty good job of handling that without needing exotic packages.
For Python stuff, I just need to be more responsible about using v-envs properly. I'm lazy and am always thinking ... what if this dependency needs this other dependency... then you end up with different versions of different things needing different dependencies.
It is a bit like a MMO or RPG - satisfy the dependencies. But only the specific ones at high tide, when the constellations are as such...
Does it not try to install them or at least tell you when it needs stuff?
Yes, Python is very good at this but as a human with a limited tolerance for interpreting long strings of alpha numeric version numbers, it takes time to reconcile and get the appropriate version of a library.
Kind of like this xkcd comic
I remember that one XD