I never said supporting Israel is wrong. I just wanted to respond to your sentence saying that tech company should not be evaluated on their politics. I do not believe this, I think tech company should absolutely be evaluated on their political decisions. Like it has been the case with NSO Group.

Boycotting on technological or political ground is the same. It’s all morality based.

You can say that HP handling of customer service or technological choices are not moral and thus grant a boycott. Some people might think that their political decisions are not moral.

I don’t think you can evaluate a tech company only on its technology. For example NSO Group wrote Pegasus which is a good working spying software. Is their tech doing its job? Yes. Did they sell it to dictatorships enabling the wrongful emprisonment of many people? Seems like it.

Custom configs is for people who might not want to tinker as much so maybe it’s not for you if you prefer Arch.

To answer the question you asked previously, yes I had issues with custom configs from Debian. One I remember is mupdf being launched by a bash script and thus not understanding why did I have two PIDs (one for bash, one for the mupdf binary) when starting.

For context this was important because I needed to know the PID of mupdf to send a SIGHUP to update the view.

Arch also does its own packaging on its repos.

However you are right that Arch tries to stay as close as possible to the source. This is fondamentally different than the debian (and thus all debian-derived distros) way of packaging where they aim for a fully integrated OS at the expense of applying their own patches to many packages.

The patches can sometimes bring issues since they can bring unexpected behaviour if you come from Arch and sometimes will help the end user tremendously since they won’t have to configure every piece of software to work on their computer.

This is really two way of looking at the issue: Arch is make your own OS and Debian has a more hands off approach.

That’s because it is not :) especially since many WiFi card vendors do not give documentation so writing a driver for it is basically impossible.