I grew tired of shitty “Top 10 Linux distros in ${CURRENT_YEAR}” articles so I wrote a blogpost, that I would personally consider helpful when I was starting out, so I can simply link it to people when they ask my opinion on a beginner distro.
Objective criticism is welcome and encouraged.
I’d argue that while not beginner friendly, Arch’s “difficult to install” reputation is a bit of a hold-over from the past seeing as archinstall exists on the iso and guides you through everything… but I’ve also not had it work successfully for me the few times I tried it and just had to install manually instead 🤦♂️ 🤣
Archinstall is great but also the wiki itself recommends manual install and I still think for someone who never touched Linux Calamares would be better.
You’re probably right there. To me, Arch really seems like an endgame distro, for when you’ve tried enough options to know what you like and you just want to roll that without any cruft.