MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

After you've gotten used to Linux, you might want to try Arch.

It is lightweight, since you choose everything that is installed, sort of opt-in.

It has all the latest software.

It has "rolling releases" which means there is never a giant lost-weekend distribution upgrade.

It has the AUR (arch user repository) for just about any software ever.

I used Arch on a server once (still running) but found the experience on Debian was more to my taste, and somehow never liked pacman. Maybe it's time to take another look. I never tried it on the desktop.

I've never lost a weekend to a Debian dist-upgrade. Just read the release notes carefully beforehand, take a full backup of your data (which you should be doing anyway), make a note of any non-Debian applications you're using on that machine (that's the stuff that will need the most extensive testing post-upgrade) and it should simply work.

Interesting, I have opposite experience. Pacman looks so much simpler than aptitude, apt-get, apt-cache, dpkg. And makepkg - it just works. I have not managed to create packages on Ubuntu.

No outdated packages, no ppa. No upgrade. Install is rough but it nails how simple the system is.

Ubuntu is a good starting point. But there is so much more.

I have. debian, raspbian, ubuntu. A few times it has gone well, only to find there was cruft left over from previous installs.

"it should simply work" is not a given on any linux.

I'm not denigrating those distributions, there are lots of reasons to have a stable release without a lot of things changing (especially development).

It's just that changing lots of assumptions at once is fragile.

I agree about makepkg / PKGBUILD -- I've casually made packages.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PKGBUILD

For debian/ubuntu it is not as straightforward.