Eh Arch being “hard” is overblown. I’ve honestly spent just as much time troubleshooting windows crap or other distro crap. You just have to learn all the little tricks and whatnot that are specific to arch. It happens over time naturally.

Nice thing about arch is the community. Great documentation and if you find something that doesn’t work - somebody motivated will make it work and share. Example: protonvpn decided “nah we’re not supporting arch”. No big deal, someone in the community has packaged it up and maintains it for us.

Arch users rule

Once I have learned Arch, installing and maintaining it is super easy and fast. Troubleshooting a problem if it occurs is also easier because you know more how the system works internally.

But there is another problem I see when using it daily for many different things. I install Arch and week later when sending emoji find out there is no emoji font and I need to install one. Then month later needing to quickly use Bluetooth I realize I forgot to install bluez and some of it’s frontend. Then about to print something and now I need to learn how to install CUPS print server. All those things takes few minutes and have the best documentation in the Linux world, but after fresh install I get annoyed for first month or two for stuff that come preinstalled on other distros.

But… That’s also why I use Arch. I could run some post-install script from someone or use Endevour, but setting stuff how I want is the beauty of Arch.

As a capable but lazy Arch user, not much. It certainly bugs me a helluva lot less than Ubuntu and Manjaro did.

Once you install Arch with the archinstall script and set everything, you’ll be fine.

Arch is as hard as you make it be. I run Arch with Gnome using mostly flatpaks and I the only maintenance I have to do with my pc is run sudo pacman -Syyu once a day to keep everything up-to-date.

Of course you can make it be as hard as trying to swimming in lava, but it’s your choice to make like that.

Well, it depends on what you want from your OS.

If you want games to work with as little bother as possible then a gaming distro might be a better option. The only distro I tried where games JUST WORK on their own is Nobara. They have lots of patches to make games actually work. If you want to play Windows games on steam then be sure to install It’s made by the same guy that makes ProtonGE, which you should definitely install if you want to play Windows games on steam, whatever your distro (if it’s not Nobara, you can use ProtonUp-Qt to avoid having to install it manually).

Some games just won’t run on any of the distros I tried except Nobara. I’m sure you could get them working fine on Arch or any other distro with some work… but that’s work. When it comes to gaming I don’t want to go in computer wizard mode, I just want to ride dinosaurs. (Yes I realize the irony of saying that after ditching Nobara on my gaming pc because I would rather have Arch with some games not working than Nobara with everything working)

Other than gaming I’d say it depends if you like being forced to do things yourself.

I’m a very lazy woman who switched from Windows 10 less than one year ago and tried several distro before ending up with Arch, and it is absolute heaven compared to Windows.

Lots of stuff don’t don’t work on my computer, but not because Arch is broken, I just haven’t got around to configuring them (lazy + adhd) or I tried but failed because I have no clue what I am doing (four months on Arch for a grand total of eight on linux, so that’s to be expected). But I prefer it that way. When I really need a feature it forces me to learn how stuff work, and that was the point of installing Arch instead of a distro that would do everything for me. I’ve learned a dozen times more in four months on Arch than in the same time on other distros. Or in 25+ years on Windows… I’ve still got a long way to go and there are lot of stuff that I can’t get working yet (looking at you Wayland portals >_<) but I really like it and I don’t think I’ll switch (though I’m very tempted to try Nix…).

It you do decide on Arch, please don’t listen to people who insist that you shouldn’t use the archinstall script because the only “right” way to install Arch is to do a manual install. They’re morons. The script is a great way to have a working Arch install quickly and easily, so you can actually use Arch and see if you like it. There’s a lot to be learned by doing a manual install, yes. But it’s ridiculous to ask people who really want to use Arch to keep using other distros for however long it takes them to learn enough to do a manual Arch install, when they could just use the script and do the same learning while using Arch. If you want to do a manual install go for it, but pressuring people into it is just stupid.