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I've never had a good experience with an arch based distro. I understand that's kind of the goal, and it's great if you want to use your computer to set up arch, but I want to use my computer for other things.
Endeavor, Arch, Manjaro et al.
I’ve used arch for the past 10 years or so as my primary OS, and it only took 7 or 8 of those years to get the OS set up.
/s in all seriousness, I kind of get what you’re saying. But I don’t think that having a bad experience is the goal at all though. I think the goal is to provide an OS that lets users decide on exactly what collection of packages they want on their system, and to provide packages that are up to date and unmodified from their upstream.
Setting up your system additively comes with a cost, though. It’s way less convenient than just installing something that someone else has configured.
To me personally, I think the one-time upfront cost of setting up arch is less burdensome than dealing with configuration files that have been moved to non-default locations (transmission-daemon on Debian-based distros is one example), packages being seriously out of date and thus missing new features and bug fixes (neovim), and dealing with cleaning up packages if you prefer to use non-default software and don’t want a ton of clutter.
Definitely valid to prefer a preconfigured system, I just think it’s a misrepresentation to say that the point of arch is to be difficult, or that configuration takes a ton of time for users of arch. Maybe learning to use arch takes longer, but learning to use arch is just learning to use Linux, so it’s hard for me to see that as a bad thing. And it doesn’t take that long to learn, I was more productive in arch after a couple days than I’ve ever been on *buntu, Debian or Mint.