If I recall correctly though Arch is pretty good about avoiding making things unduly overly configured, preferring a mostly vanilla install of software where possible. This is SO crucial and is probably one of the biggest places I lose my mind with Debian derivatives. I shouldn't need documentation for using a package on Debian; reading software's official documentation should be sufficient to be accurate without major caveats about what was modified.

Nix isn't really unixlike either. More in the spirit of NeXT than unix. IE, proto-mac, with extra steps. Also, I definitely agree about systemd. all of it unnecessary, just like C++ and Rust philosophy of "woo expressiveness". Rust in particular really grinds my gears. You feel it when you try to start learning it but go look at how the language grammar works. There's like 6 elements to it that are fully combinatorial. Looks similar to Go's count of language features until you realise that it's actually over 3x as complex. Which explains why it takes about the same time to build as C++ with ccache installed. strfry and nostr-rs-relay both take about 11 minutes on my hardware. Khatru, relayer, orly. maybe 40 seconds with a clean build cache.