I used to think that Fedora being ultimately backed by IBM would give them stability. Then Redhat dismissed Tom Cotton, who was a key OSS liaison, and now it seems to be embarrassing itself with this bitterly hostile attitude towards everyone in the RHEL orbit. It’s been so out-of-character that most people initially assumed this was IBM leaning on RHEL. But it apparently was not. Then my Fedora installation choked on what seemed like a pretty ordinary kernel update and stopped booting.
It felt like a signal. I settled on EndeavourOS, and it’s been an all-around improvement. Nvidia drivers are optionally baked in, the AUR (which EOS also bakes in) is ten times what Copr could ever hope to be, and pacman is ridiculously speedy (though I suppose anything is faster than DNF). I know EOS will sometimes break, as is tradition for rolling releases, but I’m confident that Arch will at least keep being Arch for many years to come.
That reminds me of a Microsoft-branded USB WiFi adapter that I was making heavy use of back in mid-2000s. The MN-510. You could buy it brand-new circa 2006. It had a $75 launch MSRP, about $114 adjusted for inflation. Come 2009, we find out that Windows 7 wasn’t going to support it. And given what we know about OS development cycles, they presumably made that call in '08 or even '07. Looking back on it, I think this was one of the major catalysts for me to reconsider Linux as a drop-in replacement. Because, wouldn’t you know, the adapter kept working just fine when I tried it out in Ubuntu. Support was simply there in the kernel. Plug-and-play. I suddenly had this whole other operating system providing an it-just-works network connection, for free. It was amazing. So I used that adapter for several more years until I could afford a network upgrade. And I’m still using Linux the majority of the time today.