you can choose your de, and with some distros (like arch) your packages don’t come preconfigured. which also makes a lot of difference.

controversial opinion: distro/software wars are good, because they make people discuss about their software, which motivates the developers. you don’t see windows software wars, because they can’t choose their de

ngl, typing paru/yay [description of repo] is faster than downloading and installing the repo. even if you install it with git, you still need to know the git link.

yes. arch is some effort to configure and get working properly, but once it works it’s so nice

(well, it was for me. I respect you if you have your own opinion and distro preferences)

if by cache you mean that your entire system is on your drive and that the hdd is for backups or games that you’re not currently playing but don’t want to reinstall, yes.

it’s not secure by design, since it’s not made to be secure, and also uses unstable versions of a lot of packages to make certain exploits work