I’m somewhere in the U.S. Our local politicians suck. I want to relocate. I supported someone last election cycle who was opposed to flock cameras, but they’ve completely fallen in lockstep with the established authoritarians since taking office. So I have been trying to avoid flock cameras on my route to work. But every time I find a minor detour, a new camera pops up. And even then, many of those detours are through residential neighborhoods, where every third person is a collaborator has a ring camera. My current route has me circling around the entire town before slipping back in on the other side. My commute has gone from ~20 minutes to ~40 minutes each way, which is just barely within my tolerance before I throw in the towel. There are several businesses I won’t even go to anymore, either because every possible route is surveilled, or because the business owners actively work against my interests (e.g. Whole Foods), which is actually good, since I find myself rabidly supporting local businesses, just as I should have been doing all along.

I mean, you don’t necessarily need a fresh Arch install; I’d wager you could just switch to Arch in place by editing your /etc/pacman.conf and /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist to Arch repos. You’d probably need to keep a Manjaro section at the bottom of pacman.conf to avoid breaking too many things at first. Is this a good idea? Probably not, but it’d be fun to try.