I’m not a computer expert or planning to be. I’m just a computer user, a coder, a gamer, and I think I will get the opportunity to afford cheaper PCs if I use the Arch distro from Linux which is very lightweight and fast. I’ve heard Microsoft forces you to bloat your PC with win11.

I’m not a computer expert or planning to be. Then don’t use Arch. Seriously, where are you guys even finding out about Arch, much less wanting to try it? Whoever told you Arch would be a good fit, don’t listen to them on anything Linux-related again. Arch is not for beginners, and it’s not for people who don’t want to learn the ins and outs of their computer because they’re having to dig into the guts to fix it whenever an update breaks something. Arch is a fine distro for people who WANT those things, need bleeding edge hardware support, and don’t mind having to fix it whenever it breaks. It doesn’t sound like that’s at all what you’re looking for though.

It’s likely idiots confusing normal arch and things like endeavour or cachy. Pre built arch distros are legitimately as bullet proof as something like mint. Everything’s guis, everything’s pre done by the distro mainter, and you basically have to do nothing. This isn’t 2003 anymore. Arch based distros dont just randomly explode any more or less then fedora or Ubuntu or popos at this point. For heaven sake steamos is arch. Arch is unironically likely the single most commonly used distro for new users of the last few years because of the steamdeck. A new user shouldn’t be doing arch from scratch, but a distro is a distro they don’t just go boom because of random happenstance.

I wouldn’t say arch and arch-based are the same thing. If someone specifically asks about arch, I’d be inclined to advise them it’s not suitable for people not interested in reading and learning a bit. But I also agree arch-based are pretty solid and much more beginner friendly.

I mean, Arch is a pretty nice place to start for someone who is interested in understanding how the system works and to get a glimpse of what is system administration. But if that is not the objective, and the person just wants to use the pc normally, then I guess any other distribution will be fine. At this point I feel there really is no point to all these different distributions. When Ubuntu came out it was the great new thing simple to use and friendly to new users. When Mint came out it was the brand new Ubuntu even better than before. But at this point… Pretty much any distribution is usable, do we really need so many? There’s some 5 arch based that came out past year, God knows how many Debian based and so on. I feel this has become futile. Just pick any distribution, it will be fine: arch may break a bit more often than the other ones, provided you can set it up; pick any derivative if you don’t want to spend time setting it up. Debian may have packages that are a bit outdated, pick any derivative if you want a bit newer packages. Fedora will be in between. Suse will also be in between. That’s pretty much it: do you want something extremely stable? Debian. Do you want the latest update few hours after they’ve been pushed by dev? Arch. None of these constraints? Literally any other distribution.

That was a bit off piste wasn’t it!