I only use debian

pulseaudio I had to fight every single day, with my "exotic" setup of one set of speakers and a headset

with pipewire, I've never had to even touch it

systemd: yesterday I had a network service on one machine not start up because the IP it was trying to bind to wasn't available yet

the dependencies for the .service file didn't/can't express the networking semantics correctly

this isn't some hacked up .service file I made, it's that from an extremely popular package from a very popular distro

(yeah I know, use a socket activated service......... more tight coupling to the garbage software)

the day before that I had a service fail to start because the wall clock was shifted by systemd-timesyncd during startup, and then the startup timeout fired because the clock advanced more than the timeout

then the week before that I had a load of stuff start before the time was synced, because chrony has some weird interactions with time-sync.target

it's literally a new random problem every other boot because of this non-deterministic startup, which was never a problem with traditional init or /etc/rc

for what? to save maybe a second of boot time

if the distro maintainers don't understand the systemd dependency model after a decade then it's unfit for purpose

"The trick is the same: use a popular linux distribution and don't fight the kinks."

I believe that you are genuinely being sincere here, thinking this is good advice.

But this is an absolutely terrible philosophy. This statement is ignorant as well as inconsiderate. (again, I do believbe you don't intend to be inconsiderate consciously, that is just the result.)

It's ignorant of history and inconsiderate of everyone else but yourself.

Go back a few years and this same logic says "The trick is, just use Windows and do whatever it wants and don't fight."

So why in the world are you even using Linux at all in the first place with that attitude? For dishonest reasons (when unpacked to show the double standard).

Since you are using Linux instead of Windows, then you actually are fine with fighting the tide. You want the particular bits of control you want, and as long as you are lucky enough to get whatever you happen to care about without fighting too much, then you have no sympathy for anyone else who cares aboiut anything else.

You don't see yourself as fighting any tides because you are benefitting from being able to use a mainstream distro without customizing it. But the only reason you get to enjoy any such thing at all in the first place is because a lot of other people before you fought the tide to bring some mainstream distros into existence, and actually use them for ordinary activities enough despite all the difficulties, to force at least some companies and government agencies to acknowledge them. So now you can say things like "just use a mainstream distro as it comes and don't try to do what you actually want".