This isn't a technical requirement. It's a legal requirement based on either incomplete or vested understanding of the problem. Such requirements must not only be rejected, the legislators who propose those should be investigated for graft and public shunned and shamed. Traitors of humanity!

What sort of crappy website is this? It says that this site is not accessible from my location. Even sites about open source are gatekeeping now?

Arch guide expanded in scope IMO. The choices are way more than in the past. However, it's good quality and easy to read. I implore you to skim it, even if you don't try it out.

I do recommend Gentoo (haven't tried Funtoo) for the academically inclined. It's a beast to maintain, but you'll soon find yourself at ease with configuring and compiling your own kernel, configuring your packages and even making some yourself.

It isn't as hard as people make it out to be - if you gradually push your boundaries. In particular, it's good if you already use Arch.

Why are sensitive or critical hospital systems loaded with bossware? That itself is a breach of medical safety regulations and medical privacy. If such bossware fails for whatever reason - even sabotage, it's on the leach class. Prosecute them for murder.

It's still possible on almost any distro with pyenv or asdf-vm.

In practice, all those tight coupling between components mean that it behaves more or less monolithic, despite the claims to the contrary. Replacing them with alternatives is a pain because something else breaks or some software has a hard dependency on it.

The problem I have is with the installer GUI. They often don't work well when doing complex partitioning or mounting. Theoretically, you could use fdisk/parted on the live CD to do the partitioning. But the mounting section of the GUI (the part that creates the fstab) still struggles to map these new partitions the way we want it. This happens often when using btrfs subvolumes, LVM, dmcrypt or standard/custom ESP mount points (individually or in combination).

None of these are a problem when you are using a regular terminal shell to install the distros. You can just write fstab manually the way you like. This is a classic example of GUIs being convenient, but CLIs being more complete and powerful.

Theoretically, it's possible to achieve CLI installation for other distros too. Debian, for example with debootstrap. However, those procedures aren't as well documented as for Arch and Gentoo, because you're expected to use the GUI installer. CLI installation just feels natural in Arch and Gentoo.

Another issue I have is with boot loader installation. I have 2 Linux distros (for genuine uses) and a BSD installed. I use rEFInd to manage them. GUI installers replace rEFInd with their boot loader. While this can be reverted manually, it's annoying. But Grub has a CLI option to disable this (--no-nvram).

Does Arch have other tools beyond that which are unique to Arch?

Arch and Gentoo has additional small utilities like pacstrap and eselect. They're not big, but are very helpful when you need them.

Is there a difference how you configure a window manager on Arch and Debian?

I always find it easier to configure things on Arch than on Debian. There are two reasons for this. First is that Arch has an extensive wiki written with the assumption that you'll customize things (which is actually helpful even for other distros). Second is that software on distros like Debian are heavily patched for system consistency, while Arch and Gentoo provide mostly vanilla packages. This means that user documentation from the upstream software developer can be used directly on Arch and Gentoo, whereas you need to be aware of the patching in Debian.

One interesting example of the last point is the recent xz backdoor. That backdoor wouldn't have worked if Debian and Fedora didn't patch OpenSSH to talk to systemd. While Arch and Gentoo also reverted these backdoors, their OpenSSH were never patched and didn't have this vulnerability.

What are the other reasons?

I saw the discussion that led to this, live on fediverse. Confusion and surprise were the dominating themes. Even the best git gurus were taken by surprise and even a partial clarification needed checking the git source code. It says how difficult git is as a tool. It's likely that the git developers are the only ones who know how to use it correctly. While this is not unusual for custom tools, it shows how much thought should go into UI design for public software.

I'm surprised that the 3-way merge isn't well known. In the earlier days of Git, the 3-way merge was its selling point, over contemporary alternatives like CVS and SVN (where people used to avoid branching, since merges broke far too often). There is a command called diff3 that can do 3-way diffs and merges. Many GUI diff tools like Meld and KDiff3 have built-in 3-way diff functionality. The git book also talks about how this is done.

Did you miss the part where I said they use the security argument to lock down the device and restrict the user? In addition, Linux distros in their default configuration may not be secure - but there are plenty of packages that can secure it down to a deep level. It just depends on the user's threat level assessment. That military establishment vs homeless tent analogy is just pure hyperbole and FUD.

I strongly disagree about generics / syntax. IMO they’re fine and you’ll learn to love them.

True! Rust's design is very orthogonal. The generics, lifetimes and other similar features work very well together.