yes haha

I don’t consider Arch and Arch based distros to be very stable. They include the latest bleeding edge software and that might introduce bugs. In my experience they were notably less stable than something like Debian. Also, the package-management system practically broke when I didn’t update my packages for a while (which would conflict with OP’s wish for “stability” as well as “low maintenance”). Arch is great at what it does but it doesn’t seem to me that this is what OP is looking for.

Thank you, great answer! (I like numbers)

My recommendation: LinuxMint with the Cinnamon desktop.

1. planned usage: should have all the software you described
2. default settings: has intuitive default settings, especially if you are used to windows
3. configuration: has lots of cool settings for tweaking your desktop - really fun stuff
4. low maintenance: it just works. You never really have to do anything
5. stability: based on Ubuntu and Debian and uses LTS releases (unlike some distros who use a rolling release model)
6. automatic updates: don’t know if that’s enabled by default but it’s super easy to turn on/off

It does have some applications installed by default but that’s very common and you can always just go into the software center and uninstall stuff. Apart from that, everything else seems to fit.

Yeah pretty much, I guess

yeah something like that. having libraries bundled with programs but still having programs being dependencies for other programs. Basically I want to know how much difference it would make if there was no /lib

Seems to me that jasondj was just giving an example of how this could look like

I used flatpak+flathub to distribute a program I wrote. My program and all the updates were not reviewed in any way. I can even change permissions and the user doesn’t get a warning. I don’t trust flatpak or flathub. I also don’t trust snaps or AppImages. I only trust packages from linux distributions official repositories

Thank you for the links. I am curious about how this stuff works