[grahamjperrin]

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_compared_to_other_dist... exists, but probably does not answer your question.

For Arch users of KDE Plasma and applications, are essential packages ever missing? <https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE#Installation>

From https://gist.github.com/grahamperrin/307b8cdef5d4dcd30f5fdc4... for FreeBSD:

> It's not unusual for a Tier 1 platform to have no package for a wanted desktop environment. Two platforms are at this tier: …

For example, kde for FreeBSD 15.0-CURRENT was recently missing for a few days for AMD64; is still missing for aarch64 (64-bit ARMv8).

This is not to criticise the maintainers of packages or repos. I do understand the constraints.

The absence of an essential meta package is, inescapably, an impedance when aiming to test installers and upgrades, especially with pkgbase.