I’m talking from experience both in education and sysadmin duties. In my life I helped hundreds of people switch to Linux, for work, for home, for everything in between, and was that helpful person that answers all their questions. I have the statistics, however informal, I know what I’m talking about. There are whole categories of problems that people encounter with Ubuntu and it’s derivatives that just categorically don’t exist in Arch. And you can trust whatever the fuck you want.

4: those commands were written for previous version of Ubuntu and now dependency tree doesn’t compute, also one of the commands is to add their custom repo, and you don’t have keys for it so it doesn’t work anyway. You try to remove the bad repo and now your apt is all fucked. You regenerate your repo list, googled the package and your version name, random stackexchage page gave you their live repo, but it needs a newer version of a library that incompatible with 54 of something that you already have. You learn about snap, installed 43Gb of something, it exists but still doesn’t really work because package maintaiers didn’t actually move it to snap, it was someone else. By this point you copy-pasted so many commands into your terminal you afraid it gained sentience. You call your more computer literate friend, he starts saying something about incompatible dependancies, containers, and you don’t really understand much. By the end, you decide that you didn’t actually want the software.
Later you discover that your sound doesn’t work anymore, and there is an error when you reboot.

Good ending: you installed Arch, installed yay and instead of remembering unmemorable -S you just do yay package_name and you’re very happy with your choices.

If you need a GUI software manager, my suggestion is to not use arch

Arch is actually great for beginners, way better than usual alternatives like Ubuntu for example. If you need a GUI software manager, Arch or Arch derivatives are still better than a lot of the rest.
Besides, a lot of people like fancy GUIs, nothing wrong with that. You’re right that graphic app stores aren’t amazing, but that’s shouldn’t be the norm then. I will still do everything in CLI, but I will vehemently defend our less technically advanced bretheren’s right to click their mouse on the colourful buttons

There is a bunch of stuff that can become an alternative, if the users will come.

By now it’s kind of getting clear that fundamentally it’s the best version of the thing that we get. This is a primetime.
For some time, there was a legit question of “if we give it enough data, will there be a qualitative jump”, and as far as we can see right now, we’re way past this jump. Predictive algorithm can form grammatically correct sentences that are related to the context. That’s it, that’s the jump.
Now a bunch of salespeople are trying to convince us that if there was one jump, there necessarily will be others, while there is no real indication of that.

You’re failing into the same trap. When the letters on the screen tell you something, it’s not necessarily the truth. When there is “I’m reasoning” written in a chatbot window, it doesn’t mean that there is a something that’s reasoning.

Your deep insecurity is too on the nose

Americans and their main character syndrome drives me up the wall sometimes. Even well meaning ones can’t not interpret the world from the perspective of US doing a thing, and everything else being the consequence of that.
I just hope that most of that are bots trying to stir chaos, otherwise it’s too sad

What do you do to it so it becomes unstable?

Letters? On my screen? Instead of icons and pictograms that I can click with my mouse? Preposterous!

The golden standard for me, about anything really, is a number of published research from relevant experts that are not affiliated with the entities invested in the outcome of the study, forming some kind of scientific consensus. The question of sentience is a bit of a murky water, so I, as a random programmer, can’t tell you what the exact composition of those experts and their research should be, I suspect it itself is a subject for a study or twelve.
Right now, based on my understanding of the topic, there is a binary sentience/non sentience switch, but there is a gradient after that. I’m not sure we know enough about the topic to understand the gradient before this point, I’m sure it should exist, but since we never actually made one or even confirmed that it’s possible to make one, we don’t know much about it.

That’s the fun thing: burden of proof isn’t on me. You seem to think that if we throw enough numbers at the wall, the resulting mess will become sentient any time now. There is no indication of that. The hypothesis that you operate on seems to be that complexity inevitably leads to not just any emerged phenomenon, but also to a phenomenon that you predicted would emerge. This hypotheses was started exclusively on idea that emerged phenomena exist. We spent significant amount of time running world-wide experiment on it, and the conclusion so far, if we peel the marketing bullshit away, is that if we spend all the computation power in the world on crunching all the data in the world, the autocomplete will get marginally better in some specific cases. And also that humans are idiots and will anthropomorphize anything, but that’s a given.
It doesn’t mean this emergent leap is impossible, but mainly because you can’t really prove the negative. But we’re no closer to understanding the phenomenon of agency than we were hundred years ago.

You’re attributing a lot of agency to the fancy autocomplete, and that’s big part of the overall problem.

I worked as a subcontractor with a lead architect that used casting to void * as an only method of sending data. Argument to a function? Void *. Return value? Void *. Multithread pipe? Cast to a void *, no big deal. 80% of my job was investigating segfaults. 20% was heavy drinking to prevent suicidal thoughts.