For me
Mint
Manjaro
Zorin
Garuda
Neon
You are saying that the elitist reputation of Arch overblown. I agree. It is not that Arch it self is overrated though. Arch is awesome ( and not as “hard” as people make it out to be - we agree on that ).
My favourite distro right now is EndeavourOS and that is just easier to install Arch.
I guess I used a whole lot of words to say what you just did in just a few sentences. Thanks for summarizing my thoughts. Just out of curiosity though, why EndeavourOS? See this is also something that tripped me up. I see quite a few Arch spinoffs that all claim to be easier versions which naturally lead me to believe Arch itself was complicated. Which again is probably a community/communication problem and has nothing to do with the OS itself.
I run Arch as my daily but I installed Endeavour as my teen’s first intro to Linux (and also because I couldn’t be arsed manually installing Arch). I really liked Endeavour’s Welcome screen thing. It has yay installed by dafault and you can run stuff like system update just from pressing a button on that Wecome UI. Which means my teen who is clueless about pacman and has no fucks to give for learning can run and install stuff just from clicking buttons.
As to whether it’s better or worse than Manjaro (which is my usual go to for Arch based newbie distros), I’m not sure. I think Endeavour feels lighter on its feet than Manjaro but I haven’t dine any benchmarks to say for sure. I do like pamac and have it installed on my system and I do think it’s great for new folks or people who like a GUI. That said, you can still install EndeavourOS and plonk pamac on there too.
Ah, I see. That sounds like a completely fair scenario for using something a little more automated. Thanks for sharing.
Arch seems fine and I’ll probably stay here for at least another few months, out of laziness if nothing else. If I’m not completely happy I’ll probably end up back on Tumbleweed which is my usual daily, but I can’t say I’ve had any problems that would drive me back immediately.
