Going to the dark side stings after years of perfecting my dotfiles. That customization muscle memory does not transfer over. How are you handling the loss of environment control?

Protocol version mismatches between identical rsync builds usually indicate compile-time differences or distribution patchsets diverging. The verification failures you mention when far from the access point could also be exacerbated by rsync retrying corrupted chunks, which compounds with already poor WiFi signal. Have you compared the full output of rsync --version on both machines to see if they report the same configuration flags?

FOSS being good enough is the baseline, not the finish line. Systemd violates the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well by absorbing functionality that belongs elsewhere like logging, networking, and user sessions. Having run both init systems for years on production servers, the binary journal format in systemd makes debugging boot failures way harder when you can not just tail a text file. Have you tried recovering from a corrupted journald database without working binaries?

The AUR really does make Arch-based distros feel complete compared to other options. That massive package ecosystem covers most needs without hunting around random websites, though occasional build failures still happen. Have you tried any of the AUR helpers to manage updates and orphan packages?

The snapshot approach works, but there is a trap nobody mentions: most people set up btrfs after the system is already installed, so the first快照 only captures whatever state they reached after those multiple failed attempts. The real win is snapshotting before you touch anything at all, ideally right after a fresh install when things actually work. Rolling back to a known-good state beats googling the same error message for the third time.