It's a human thing, this is all social media. It'll happen here as well if enough people join a conversation and especially if the userbase expands. Everyone just want to have their say/get attention without checking the other comments.
I haven't booted Windows since February and at this point I'm afraid to.
Indeed, besides most linux distributions are fairly equally lightweight and can be customized. I tried 4-5 distros this past January (Arch being one) when I got my new gaming laptop and they all booted in ~9.5 sec for example, and perform equally well in general, they had fairly similar RAM load with the same desktop environment.
Arch is about managing the system as a hobby, which is fine.
One problem here is that new users install Endeavour/Garuda but don't know how to manage updates safely about pacnew/pacsave/etc. So the system might slowly "rot" without them knowing about it because new components use old configs, etc..
I also recommend Mint to new users. I don't use Mint, nor do I use Arch.
If you have issues it's usually a configuration issue or a misbehaving daemon, try investigating with "systemd-analyze blame", "systemd-analyze critical-chain" and "systemd-analyze plot > boot_anal.svg".
I have a version of The More Than Complete Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy that's genuine leather bonded with gold leaf page edges and builtin bookmark. It's on display on a special shelf. Everyone who visits thinks it's a bible, and in a way it is as it does have a lot of good advice about life, the universe and everything.
I have an alias I call "upd" that runs "yay ; flatpak update", I just run that, press Y at the first prompts and then let it run in the background while I do other work. It really doesn't matter at all how long it takes. I do have NVidia but generally I don't feel it takes very long as we don't get new kernels every day. You could use the linux-lts kernel for much more rare kernel updates.
It's a bit like bittorrents, I don't need them to download in 30sec, I start it and return to check on it whenever I think of it.
I have changed my opinion on flatpak btw, I really like that the apps are not spread all over my system but instead sandboxed neatly, have fewer dependency versioning issues and it's really easy to use.
Yeah, Pocket does nothing unless you press the button.
And as for telemetry that's publicly available on telemetry.mozilla.org if anyone wants to see what's being sent. It's very useful for Mozilla to see what and how features are used.
Mozilla is our last tiny hope for freedom really, in this Chrome/Blink world..
Just to avoid misunderstandings: it's not a monotolithic blob, it is thought so because its first project was a system daemon that manages system services. It is described as "a software suite that provides an array of system components for Linux operating systems.", it is highly modular and offer many optional components that each have their own purpose.
I've been watching Asahi Lina develop a big GPU driver for Apple silicon and development was so much faster because a whole category of bugs were largely absent once the code compiled, and memory issues are notoriously difficult to fix. Also error handling is easier and much cleaner.
I leave it on, I'm proud to help the last independent browser engine we have working for a truly open web. The telemetry data is available for you to sift through here: https://telemetry.mozilla.org/
I used Jabber with the Pidgin client, my impression was also it was mostly developers and open source enthusiasts. Most people I knew who were not of those circles used commercial things like ICQ, MSN Messenger, AIM, etc. Frequently Jabber/XMPP enthusiasts had to use clients that supported it as well as some form of gateway to the other clients. Trillian was a popular multi-protocol client.
I think that we don't know the whole picture but if they're canceling VPN, Relay and Monitor it's because they're not making enough money on those services. I also think the new CEO feels they're spread too thin and need to focus resources on core products, which might be a good thing. They've gotten a lot of flak for trying different things.