I guess I just don’t expect most beginners to want to read the breaking changes. Like when firmware packages recently changed, pacman paru yay and octopi don’t tell you about those breaking changes. You just get an error when you try to update. If you read the notes, you know to uninstall the old package, install the new ones, problem solved. What about using meld to merge pacnew? I don’t expect someone in their first week of Linux to figure it out. Even if they can learn it, I don’t expect a lot of users to want to.
Maybe I need to have more faith in people? I stuck to Ubuntu derived distros for about a year before I took on Fedora, and then eventually EndeavourOS where I learned the ins and outs of managing an Arch based system. I learned a lot, and I learned it gradually, which worked well for me, so I don’t try to throw other new users in the deep end of the pool.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to bonk the immutable Stans over the head with this logic, but it never works. They install bazzite, play their game of choice on steam and occasionally use their web browser and “ALL NEW USERS MUST USE BAZZITE ITS SO EASY”
Any distro is easy when you use it like a fucking Sony PlayStation.