I think it mostly refers to a fresh install, which is fairly slim I guess (though not THAT slim either). The package (non-)granularity is still just absurd sometimes.
rustydrd
Honestly, I've been using Arch for about 10 years now, and I've never met an actual Arch elitist in real life (I guess we don't get out of the basement that much). The only people I've met who would show that attitude were usually either Ubuntu/Mint fanboys or GNU hardliners. Live and let live?
This is a preprint published on arXiv.org, which is as reputable as it gets before peer review (so no red flag but standard practice). But I agree that people shouldn't place hopes in this before it's been peer reviewed and replicated by independent researchers.
I think the question was "what's the purpose of posting this on Lemmy?" (not arXiv) because that does nothing for peer review but a lot for stirring laypeople's wild imagination.
In my experience, these YouTube channels buy that simplicity in exchange for leaving out many (important) details. Sure, college professors aren't all didactic geniuses, but making things accurate usually requires to also make it more complicated.
Some weather we're having, eh?
The true arch experience.