Yeah I'm always wary of what I install from the AUR, never more than 1 or 2 packages on any given system. But a surprising amount of stuff can be found even in the main arch repos, so the AUR is rarely necessary.
I still find it noticeable 🤷 I do have an nvme ssd, and while 50 eur is negligible to you or me, not everyone is so lucky, + there's no reason to create e-waste when your older hardware is working fine.
I avoid it like the plague. It's fat and slow, and the Arch repos + the AUR have just about everything anyway (I use Arch btw, in case you're wondering). I'll sooner build from source than touch anything flatpak.
Avoid Kaby Lake processors. I specifically have i7-7600u in my laptop and must use a kernel parameter otherwise it kernel panics freezes minutes after booting. Sometimes it still freezes when waking up from sleep or hibernate. Something to do with power management or such.
Because people will never agree on a single one, and it's FOSS so nothing is forced. I for one am glad I don't have to use apt because I prefer pacman, just as I am glad someone who doesn't want to use an Arch-derivative has Debian and apt to fall back on.
You didn't mention your hardware, but gaming in general benefits from a rolling distro for things like latest drivers, latest wine version etc. (Be aware though that if you have an Nvidia card you'll have to run the proprietary driver, the open source one performs poorly.)
I understand being wary of Arch-derivatives, but it sounds like you're the kind of user who would benefit from it and has plenty of experience with Linux, so I can sincerely recommend it. And since this is for a personal computer, nothing bad is really going to happen if it ends up not working out other than the mild annoyance of having to install something else.
But honestly, things don't break all that often, at least for me. For reference, I've been using Endeavour with KDE for a year, and the only real problem I can remember off the top of my head is that Steam was broken for like a week when the new UI rolled out that was somehow incompatible with the current Nvidia driver, but this got fixed with the next update and there was a workaround to make it run with the old UI so it remained usable.
I loved school man, and not just in retrospect, I can't believe I'm completely alone with that based on the comment section. And I wasn't even one of the "cool kids" or anything. I went to a high school that some would consider "elite" (though that description makes me cringe), and sure, there were some stressful times, but generally as long as you had realistic expectations and didn't aim to ace everything, it was pretty chill. My day began around 7:30 I think and was free after about 2pm, and usually I spent maybe like half an hour extra studying for the next day, plus a bit in the weekends, and then I could do whatever, it was such a bliss. And I loved learning, I just loved that I got to study such diverse topics, and you know what man, I love knowing that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Oh and the summer breaks were also great, some of the best times of my life. I'd take school over the sheer amount of bullshit you have to deal with as an adult any day.
My "trick" is to put it off until I can't bear the mess anymore and then it actually feels like I'm getting something done and I'm doing it because I want to as opposed to it being a pointless chore
Well, I should have worded it better. Minor issues happen every once in a while, not semi-bricked systems. On my current installation of Endeavour (an Arch derivative) which is about 1 year old, the only thing that broke for maybe a few days was Steam when they rolled out their new UI, but I could work around that by using a command line argument which I found through simple googling - no technical knowledge required, at least not more than an average gamer would have. And the issue was solved with the next nvidia update.
Your mileage may vary of course, but for me I don't feel I've had more issues on Arch than other distros.
Yeah I'm always wary of what I install from the AUR, never more than 1 or 2 packages on any given system. But a surprising amount of stuff can be found even in the main arch repos, so the AUR is rarely necessary.