TLDR: A few reasonable points and a lot of claims that appear to be inaccurate.

---

> First you install VSCode then spend then next 12 hours getting docker to run dev containers inside a WSL2 image (which is just a VM that can't talk to the internet) and TADA!

I refuse to believe that docker takes 12 hours to do anything, even for a complete beginner, and... what on earth are you on about claiming that WSL2 can't talk to the internet?

> Any expectations beyond this are probably not going to work. If you think the above person can install and use Docker you're sadly mistaken.

That might well be fair, although

> I'm a platinum star Linux user who started using Linux after buying a box of 72 floppy disks from Ygraddisil Linux in 1993 and I can't figure out Docker half the time.

... are you? I'll give beginners a pass, but docker isn't hard hard; I really struggle to square the idea of someone managing Ygraddisil but not docker.

Now on to MSYS2:)

> The installation takes forever because it's basically building an entire Linux system from scratch.

That's actually fair.

> It uses pacman from ArchLinux, which is easily the worst package manager ever invented. Quick, how do you search for a package that you've installed? Oh? What's that, did you just have to google for one of the weird single letter options? I rest my case.

What package manager is better? I've used a lot of package managers, and literally the only one where I would know how to check that without searching is apk, and even then I'd be grepping /etc/apk/world which only covers directly-installed packages (not dependencies). (FWIW, the better argument is installation: `apt install foo` is more obvious than `pacman -S foo`)

> Because of pacman it uses GPG to ensure that packages only come from approved people, which is a good thing, but pacman is terrible at maintaining the keys. Right away this first install needed to update the key list, which isn't well documented, and only documented on ArchLinux or random blog posts. Think about this: To use MSYS2 a user would have to know that pacman is from ArchLinux, know that the GPG key errors require a keyring update, and know that they have to go find the docs to do this from the ArchLinux website.

First, let me say that I think pacman is kind of annoying at handling keys, though they've improved over time. The rest of the claim appears to be nonsense.

https://googlethatforyou.com?q=pacman%20gpg%20update

Oh look, the first result is an official wiki page with a troubleshooting section. And the user didn't need to know any of those things.

> After you get through this hurdle you then have to install the right software, and MSYS2 makes the "genius" decision of letting me pick which binary I want to install for every single install. Do you need to install fmpeg? Better spend an hour sifting through clang-amd64-ucrt-mingw32-ffmpeg vs. gcc-x86_64-w32-gnu-ffmpeg and tons of packages.

Huh. Yeah, that does seem odd - is it a result of MSYS2 being oriented at devs who need compatible libraries?

> The GPG Keyring Problem

This section might be fair. It does seem like pacman should be able to automatically manage its list of trusted keys?

---

Now, all that said... if your super cool magic scripts work, and don't have significant downsides, then sure go for it. Being like 10% less antagonistic could have made this a useful list of ways some tools could improve, but as-is it's just lashing out at people in ways that seem to have little concern for reality.