I hate GUI for every little thing.
Config files are so much more flexible, shareable, and use friendly because you can edit them with anything and can have much more control.
I'm not sure why you say that. I've been using Arch to play triple A games (Control, Diablo 4, Elden Ring, Death Stranding, etc.) with NVidia GPU even (which is known to have proprietary driver and not as tweakable).
Never had a single glitch, everything runs like native.
Yeah, you're right. Might as well go with AMD. NVidia works but isn't needed. I think NVidia generally has low power draw though, so just check to make sure.
You are ruling out intelligence without (very probably) being able to define it, just because you have a vague knowledge of how it works.
The problem in this mode of thinking is
a) that you put human brains in a different pedestal, even though they follow physical processes to "predict the next word" and may be very well neural networks themselves, and
b) you are ignoring data that shows intelligence in multiple areas of the more complex models because "oh it's mindless because I know it's predicting tokens".
c) you favor of data that shows edge cases or probably that come from lower quality models.
You're not alone in this line of thinking.
Your mind is set. You'll not recognize intelligence when you see it.
I certainly wouldn't think possibly badly written and indexed docs without crowd sourced helpfulness indicator where you may or may not find your answer is 1/4 miles, while a concise highly upvoted answer in stack overflow is 21 miles.
I think you're going by the English meaning of "conservative".
The word is badly chosen, because I don't think they really are traditionalists. Probably "capitalist" would be a better fit. And paradoxically there are many things I find the "progressives" want to do which are in fact regressive.
It's a bit confusing and I think names should be changed to something else if it were up to me.
Words have power, and words like "progressive" and "woke" have positive connotations while "conservative" has negative connotation which is sad; they don't even apply anymore to the groups or ideas they represent.
There as absolutely no reason for anyone in Arch to use snap to install something mainstream like Firefox. Same goes for other OS's like Fedora etc. (which are all mined in similar way, just change it to /fedora for instance).
The page presents itself as if it's the only choice, and can easily scam someone who's just getting into Linux into installing snap. I think it's designed for that purpose. Arch links to the package, but not step by step guide (which is on Arch), but this can easily lure people into installing snap and being none the wiser the it's not the default package manager for their distro.
It's 4th for Firefox, but I've seen it as the top result for some other packages. Probably Google caught up, or probably for packages not mainstream as Firefox it still shows snap as number one result.
Your description is too reductive. You and I are also auto completes in some sense. See in order to complete a sentence well, you have to have a good model of a vast number of things including physics, psychology, linguistics, logical reasoning, socio economics, irony, sarcasm, arithmetic and many other things.
It is currently unknown how much of these the complexity of the models and training process will allow, but they have been surprising us in every step.
You wouldn't expect a "just auto complete" to figure out rules of arithmetic, but it did. You wouldn't expect it to answer tricky questions involving theory of mind, but it does. You wouldn't expect it to solve graduate level questions but it is able to.
So it's a bit too rash to expect it to not understand rm -rf as humor, if you don't know which model you will talk to.
The smaller ones, sure, are dumb. But even GPT 3 will not recommend you to rm -rf; definitely not GPT 4.
Your reason of "wish to start fresh" doesn't sound compelling.
Arch is stable, and works great. Biggest draw for NixOS is packages. I don't think NixOS has anything to offer in packages that I can't get in Arch. I'll not advocate switching to an experimental distro with who knows what other headache, just because I can run Debian or rpm packages. Not for a daily driver.
I hate that they also SEO'd the hell out of major search engines to show snap setup and installation instructions when anyone searches for installing a package. E.g. "arch install firefox" leads to https://snapcraft.io/install/firefox/arch which is downright dishonest marketing.
Sorry dude. Despite what they say, girls do not like video games. And even though you didn't mention I know your fiance is woman with high creativity.
Of course there are exceptions, but in general the truth is that girls don't like it, and she won't get into it. She may think of this as a chore, and even though she can be a backseat driver of one or two games, she still will not continue with it. Unpopular opinion I know but I'm telling you what will happen, mark my words.
I hate GUI for every little thing. Config files are so much more flexible, shareable, and use friendly because you can edit them with anything and can have much more control.