As a capable but lazy user, how much would switching to Arch frustrate me?

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.
- I had a similar issue. I actually wrote myself a text document listing out all of the programs I generally use post-install and any additional setup I did, so that way whenever I am setting up a new system I can quickly refer back to it and save myself a lot of time over doing one-off installs as I run into them.
  
  Ngl that kinda sounds like Nix with extra steps.
- but after fresh install
  See, there's your problem. If you never re-install this is longer a factor. Sure I had to do those things, but I had to do them exactly once like 8 years ago...

Just have a look at EndeavourOS which is Arch with sane pre-installed stuff. Have been using it for a year without problem. Am also lazy :D
- I'm like OP, can find my way around things but am lazy. I second this recommendation, but I just had a negative experience on it die to laziness. Got lazy around updates, let them pile up to 600 pending updates, ran them all at once and my laptop just became unresponsive. Naturally, I forced its shutdown like a caveman and had to spend the following 6 hours recovering my partition. The nice thing is that endeavour at least has some nice commands to deal with just this kind of situation. The not so nice thing is that I was lazy about looking shit up, hence the 6 hours. The command that saved me was "reinstall-kernels", fixed my systemd-boot in an instant and fixed whatever other mess I had caused.
  So yeah, it can be frustrating sometimes. Especially if you're lazy.
- FYI Plasma Wayland doesn’t start with SDDM, you have to edit ~/.bash_profile and remove the “startx” line (or comment it out)
- Arch has an installer, EndeavourOS is pointless. also mkinitcpio > dracut, you don't need a firewall, paru > yay. just use Arch
  
  Nice opinion you got there.

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 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.

Welcome! Coming from Windows myself, I made the jump to Manjaro (It has certain issues and I do not recommend it), then to Arch less than a year after. I have been on Arch full time for around 2 years now. After the initial setup, I have found Arch to be pretty low-maintenance and no harder to maintain than any other distro, hardly requiring more than the occasional yay -Syu --noconfirm in the command line to update things. As someone with less computer knowledge than an IT professional, I think Arch's reputation for being difficult is overblown IMO, and I suspect mostly due to intimidation from the more involved setup process prior to the availability of the install script.
I don't know if you have any familiarity with Linux already from your work, but regardless of what distro you go with, I would go into it with a mindset that you are learning a new skill. Some things are simply done differently in Linux than Windows and will require getting used to, such as how drives work using mounting points rather than drive letters.
Realistically, setting things up for the first time often requires additional steps and may not "just work," but when using my laptop and gaming desktop from day to day, it works just like any other OS. Gaming has been great for me generally, and the work Valve has done to improve game compatibility on Linux has been spectacular. Most Steam games do, in fact, "just work" for me.
In the 2-3 years I have been using Linux, I have rarely had things spontaneously break as many folks seem to worry about, or if I do it is because of companies not supporting their Linux communities, like Discord not pushing out updates on time, or major-event changes like the move to the Wayland graphical stack on KDE 6 which undid some of my desktop customization settings.

As a capable but lazy Arch user, not much. It certainly bugs me a helluva lot less than Ubuntu and Manjaro did.
- Amen. Additionally, for the lazy among us, get yourself one of the pacman wrappers for easy aur access

If you're not super patient, I wouldn't personally. If you do end up going with Arch, the first thing you should do is install Timeshift!!!
You will save yourself sooooo much pain and frustration, especially with Arch. Installing a system/feature-breaking update becomes trivial to undo with Timeshift. I've borked my systems multiple times and with Timeshift it took less than 5 minutes to go from a trashed system back to my fully working setup.
Set it to take an automatic snapshot once a day. That way worse case scenario, your system gets reverted to the beginning of the day.
Arch is great if you're patient and willing to learn the right way to do things in Linux.
If you want a "just works" experience though, you should look elsewhere.
- Solid advice. Good to mention too: use btrfs as filesystem for a better experience with Timeshift.
  
  Totally agree.

I wouldn't recommend it in your case. Mind you, Arch is easy enough to install with the archinstall script or say using EndeavourOS, but the issues come afterwards. For starters, you'll need to occasionally deal with .pacsave/.pacnew files when you do an update, keep up with Arch news and be aware of breaking changes which may require some non-trivial manual intervention, like in this post for example: https://lemmy.nz/post/7648427
So if you're after something that "just works", then Arch isn't for you. Since you're into gaming and you're lazy, Bazzite would be an excellent choice as its an immutable OS with atomic updates (updates either work or don't, there's no middle/broken state). But if you're after a more traditional distro (ie, non-immutable), Nobara or Pop!_OS also work well for gaming.

My 2¢ is that running Linux, you play the role of user and of sysadmin. On some distros you only put on the sysadmin hat once in a blue moon, but on others you're constantly wearing it.
My Arch experience is a few years out of date; I felt I played sysadmin more than, say, Debian Stable, but it wasn't too onerous. I also had an older Nvidia card, so there were some...fun issues now and then.
I use Debian on my machines now, and am happy. Try some different distributions! Even better, have /home on its own partition (better yet, own disk) --- changing distros can be nice and easy without worrying about your personal data.
- I tend to agree, but I also don't see it as a fault of Linux/Arch. If you're not the sysadmin for your own system, who is? I'd rather do it, assisted by the collective knowledge of the community, than have Microsoft do it for me. For the last few years it's only required a handful of interventions, with the vast majority of time being spent on initial setup and (re) configuration rather than fixing bugs or addressing breaking changes. So IMO it's more of a test of your personal willingness to invest time into learning and building things than your ability to diagnose and solve technical issues.
- I don't mind being the sysadmin of my own machine (I prefer it, in fact). It's just that I don't want to spend free time troubleshooting some obscure problem specific to my build because I chose an ASUS motherboard and I don't have drivers for my wireless headset or something. At least not when I'd rather unwind playing a game.
- If you’re already an admin at work, you might not want to do any system administration at home. Well, until you find out that Microsoft is making some obnoxious decisions on your behalf, that’s when you suddenly find the motivation to do some research and tweak a bunch of settings. Situations like that will also lead to frustrating moments when you find out that your hands are tied, and you end up looking for workarounds. Spoiler: It doesn’t get any nicer after that.
  On the other hand, if you’re running a system that requires you to take responsibility, a lazy admin will end up in frustrating situations too. It’s not that simple to balance these things. You need to know what your priorities are and what kind of sacrifices you’re willing to make.

Everyone here seems to be saying you'll have a tough time. Maybe that's right, but I haven't run "proper" Arch in a long time. My experience in an Arch-based distros these days (Garuda) has been very smooth sailing other than a few minor quirks I had to iron out. Gaming, in particular, has been mostly flawless outside of a few specific games.
That said, you'll probably have an easier time on a more stable distro, but they've all got their issues and frustrations. I'd probably recommend against something super stable like Debian if you primarily do a lot of gaming, as it'll be running older packages that might not work well with newer games (so I've heard). You may also wanna stay away from mainline Ubuntu because of the snap bullshit (personal preference, but it's a sentiment that seems to be shared by much of the community).
I guess what I'm saying is, if Arch interests you, give it (or a derivative) a shot. If not, just fire up something like Mint and be happy. It's your computer.

The most difficult is installing. Once you're on it, you're set.

if you use the archinstall to setup everything (partitioning, locales, de's, etc), not that much, but def. more than some "everything and the kitchensink straight out of the box" distros. The installer worked nicely on 2 machines I've tested it on, a laptop and a desktop. While the base system and graphical desktop installed nice, there was quite a bit of manual tinkering left.
But, steam works more or less the same on linux as it works on windows - but there is some proton version selecting, and even then absolutely everything doesn't work.
Personally, nvidia+wayland (and xwayland in general) is pretty horrid with some games, but supposedly that's supposedly getting fixed next month... It's always something and the fix is so tantalizingly close.
and, it's not like the EOL for win10 is that close, seems to be October 14, 2025, so there's still plenty of time.

A lot

Most of the time you would be fine, but sometimes stuff breaks in unexpected ways, so at the least you need to manage a good backup scheme or be ready to chroot whenever there is a system critical update.
As for Endeavor OS, It's basically Arch with a nicer and smarter installer (compared to Archinstall, not the Arch way). The downsides and maintenance are exactly the same.
There is also pacnew..

I was an Ubuntu WSL user and installed Arch Linux on my laptop without the install script and it took me a whole day plus a few more hours in the following days (reading the wiki and such). I learned a lot and it was a lot of fun.
I installed EndeavorOS on my desktop and it was.... Weird. It was so weird that I broke things and had to reinstall it twice. Endeavour is great but I had already gotten used on setting things up by myself.
I have both computers running perfectly since then but you need to keep in mind that you'll be responsible for doing maintenance on your system. Updating, checking logs, reading and rereading the arch wiki.
I wish I had tried getting into Arch sooner but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone that isn't willing to dedicate to it. Maybe try Endeavour and see if you like it?

No, it wouldn’t.

If you have an interest in Arch, I'd recommend starting with a derivative distro like EndeavourOS. It'll give you an easy installation process and a desktop that's ready to use.
Then just use it as your daily driver. You'll eventually run into the occasional issue when package X or Y upgrades and breaks something, learn to fix that, and eventually learn the "ins and outs" of Arch. That's how I started, I went from Mint to Antergos, used that for a while, then when Antergos was discontinued (RIP) I converted my install to "pure" Arch and never looked back.

Did you find you had a lot of trouble getting new peripherals to work? Things like wireless mouses/headsets?
- I'm on a distro another commenter suggested, EndeavourOS, and the only time I encountered an issue was a laptop with a less than common fingerprint reader. But it just took 15 minutes of searching to figure out how to see what the exact hardware was, and once I did, I saw someone had a driver for it in the AUR, which is a blessing in general. Everything else has just worked, including my 15 year old printer haha
- For most things it has not been an issue. Mice and keyboards have all been plug and play for me. Bluetooth headphones also work just fine for me. Setting up a printer was probably easier to do than in windows. My USB DAC, external hard drives, USB SD card readers, etc. have all been plug and play.
  A persistent issue in Linux, however, are gaming peripherals. Anything which requires proprietary vendor software to configure RGB settings may be an issue. OpenRGB detects and allows me to configure the RGB on my Logitech G Pro Wireless Mouse, and I picked up a secondhand Drop CTRL mechanical keyboard which I was also able to reprogram in Linux, but broadly speaking any peripheral which requires dedicated software to program may or may not allow reconfiguration on a case-by-case basis. The last time I had to boot into Windows was to re-bind the key-map on an off-brand USB footswitch, which was a one-time fix and then it has worked fine since then. Similarly, the RGB on the keyboard in my Gigabyte laptop can only be configured from Windows.
  On the laptop side, the main things to watch out for will be compatibility issues with fingerprint readers and certain oddball WiFi chipsets, but generally speaking my peripheral experience has been good.
- I use an MMO mouse that seems to require the installation of a (admittedly pretty crappy) proprietary software to work on 2.4GHz mode, so that's the big one. I also have use a DS4 for some games. That's 90% of it.
- I personally had a ton of issues getting a cheap Bluetooth adaptor to play nice with my switch pro controller at first, but I recently did a clean install of EndeavourOS and it has since worked quite well.
  Other than that, the only hardware issues I have had was Fable Anniversary trying to light my GPU on fire for some reason.

Are you versed in Linux though? If not I think going with Mint or another beginner friendly distro would be better.
That being said, if you are comfortable enough around Linux Arch is great, and the meme about being difficult probably stems from people who have no idea what they're doing trying to install it. The installation is the most difficult party if you can spin up a VM and successfully install and run it there you're good to go.
On the long run though I prefer Arch exactly because I'm lazy. Yes, installing it is a bit tedious, but if you know what you're doing it's 30 min of tedious stuff, then you get access to the lazy motherload, i.e. the Arch User Repository (the AUR essentially contains 99% of every software you might want to install but is not on the official repositories, so no looking for PPAs or downloading installers from random websites ever again), plus it's a rolling release distro, so no more reinstallations or version upgrades that need lots of attention.
Overall I use Arch because I'm lazy, but you need to be comfortable around Linux for you to be able to be Lazy using Arch.

If you want minimal maintence avoid window managers and go for desktop environments. Installing KDe or Gnome you shouldn't have any problems
- This is the exact hole that had me quit Gentoo so many times over the years. When I stopped trying to be cool and just set my system up with KDE it finally stuck and I've been happily using it ever since.
  Once you're past setup and understand package management, what is a distro but a desktop environment, after all?

If you're just gaming and using godot, Bazzite (im not quite sure if it's spelled like that) with KDE is probably a better choice, it's immutable so you can't really break the system outside of your home directory.

I moved from Arch to Bazzite as my day to day. I enjoy my time more than with Arch. More than a few times I went to do updates or install something and it took forever. Could be (probably is) my fault for not knowing how to skip some of it at the time? I find Bazzite to be intuitive and cutting edge enough for my liking. The gaming aspect of the OS makes certain things easier too.

Try a beginnerfriendly distro like mint first, instead of directly using a distro mainly used by advanced users.

I mean maybe? Arch is fun as a project, but imo it's not very fun if you're looking for a stable daily driver without fuss.
If you enjoy spending an evening tinkering with your config and installing various workarounds, arch is the perfect playground for you, but if that annoys you then I'd suggest looking at more stable established distros, at the very least until you start to get bored by stability. Personal pick is debian, but if you're coming from IT you could install a distro you're already familiar with like alma or Ubuntu.

If it's your first distro, then it might be an overkill.
I'd first start out with a readymade distro, because maybe it already fits your needs and wants. If you get to a point where you spend a lot of time on rebuilding your setup or distro-hopping, then Arch can be considered.
(Not because you are lazy. I'm lazy, too, but maintenance isn't much work, unless you're running updates too infrequently. You should check the news before updating. Many users don't and even then when you "break" something, it's not too difficult to identity the problem and fix it with the great help of ArchWiki, the community and chroot.)

If you're new to Linux, I would reccomend fedora if you don't want to have to fuck with anything, but if you work in IT, you will inevitably want to fuck with stuff more, and arch is great for learning

It was fun for me to switch. I had the same mentality as you had, I could've waited until windows 10 support ended to switch to Linux, but I decided to switch a few years ago and now I have years of experience.
You'll definitely need to get used to hunting down that one single package you need to get the programs you want working. I find it nice to dedicate an evening to getting something working, and that's fun for me. For example, I took an evening to get thumbnails working in "file Explorer" (it requires ffmpeg btw). You can be lazy with Arch, but it will take time to get it perfect. The problem with arch is you can make it to your standards. If you have low standards, you can get away with a lot.

Arch is like buying a Lego and putting it together versus an action figure. If you don't enjoy putting together the Legos then what's the point?
You should probably go with a ready to use distro

Arch has great performance but sometimes you update your system and the [choose something] doesnt work anymore. I enjoyed when i had a ton of time to put into, now that i need something that just works and wont break for no reason its a no for me

You can try CachyOs. Arch base with modern packages compiled and built for more recent cpus.
Also,rather easy to maintain and very fast.

As a lazy Arch user, I can tell you that there will be frustrating moments, but not that many. Mostly you’ll be fine, but be prepared for minor annoyances.
Features
If you didn’t install it, it’s not on the system. That’s good for a minimalistic system, but frustrating for a lazy admin. Once you’ve ironed out all the issues you encounter during the first few months, the system should be pretty solid and worry free. However, once you encounter a new situation, you have to do your research, and install (and maybe even configure) that one missing thing. Later down the line, this becomes increasingly rare, but never disappears completely, so be prepared for minor annoyances like this.
Interventions
Before updating, check the official site for big news. Some rare updates require intervention, so you should know what you’re doing before updating your system. Usually it’s totally fine, and you can run the update command blind folded. It’s definitely not recommended, but it’s not going to destroy a simple installation any time soon. If you do complex stuff with your system, the updates become more frustrating. However, once you break your grub this way, you’ll learn to read those notes before updating. These things don’t happen often, but once a special update like that does roll out, you’re going to find it frustrating. Could take a few years, so you don’t really need to worry about it today. Just know what you’re getting into.
Updating takes a while
I update roughly once a week, but occasionally only once a month. Maybe there’s something wrong with my connection or settings, but I get timeouts all the time. As a result, I ended up just using the no timeout option instead of actually doing my research and looking into this problem. Need to take that deep dive one weekend eventually. One month worth updates is also a lot of data to download, and I’m getting 0 kb/s for several minutes at a time, so it takes even longer. A lazy admin suffers from annoyances like these. Be prepared for something similar to happen to your system sooner or later. Probably takes only 30 minutes of reading and two commands to fix, but I’ll get around to it another day. Before anyone asks, yes, I’m using a list of the fastest servers, and no, I haven’t updated that list in months.
I still have Arch on my main laptop, but recently I replaced the Fedora of my HTPC with Debian. I just can’t be bothered to spend a minute on system maintenance, so Debian is better suited for that purpose. I’m still going to stick with Arch for reasons I don’t even fully understand. Probably just sunk cost fallacy at this stage…
- The updating issue is something i have to deal with too, its just that the good mirrors constantly change. there's several tools to automatically update pacman's mirrorlist, but for some reason i don't really like any of them ( reflector, rankmirrors/ratemirrors idk, others....)
  but with an updated mirrorlist and a pacman config that allows like 5+ parallel downloads (dont ask me why thats not the default, or at least wasnt when i installed) updating is decently fast. until you start using certain packages from the AUR.
  
  Thanks. I should really look into automatically updating the mirrorlist. I’ll start with reflector and the others you mentioned.

Not much if you’re patient enough to set it up in the first place. It will generally frustrate you less once you figure it out and set it up properly. There is now text based installer that makes the installation fairly simple

The arch iso offers a install guide nowadays (archinstall), so nah not that much.

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.

As a Mint user who just starting test-driving Arch: once you get through the installation the switch isn't at all difficult. Now,t hat having been said, the installation can have some frustrating moments depending on how you go about it.

I just switched over today just to see what its all about. I've been using linux as my only OS for about a year now. Been on ubuntu, pop, fedora, etc... Sysadmin by trade. I am a linux novice I'd say. Not a noob, but not an expert. Still have a lot of issues just figuring out startup/service stuff, etc...
Followed this guide: https://gist.github.com/mjnaderi/28264ce68f87f52f2cabb823a503e673 (I wanted my drive encrytped).
I am up and running and basically back to where I was on fedora 40. I was doing this mainly to always be on the latest. Having to learn pacman and yay. I am finding I can get everything running but it's definitely more involved.
No regrets just it did take a few hours. Not sure if it was worth it tbh at this point. lol
If I need to reinstall arch, I'm going to use endeavorOS. The entire time I was setting it up, I was like "why am I doing this?". I automate everything I can at my job, why am I doing this the old fashion way...
- It was really worth it for me. Having control of what stays and what doesn't is a big relief for me. I wanted switch away a few times when something broke but nothing was as smooth and curated like my arch linux setup.
  
  I will say a day or two later I am really enjoying it thus far. A bit turned off by the manual install but now I know exactly what is on my system, like you said "curated" and I am really liking yay.

Arch requires a lot of effort to maintain.
- That's just a lie
- Did you craft a very unorthodox and complex system? If so, I can believe you.
  However, I went with a very traditional system with ext4, no fancy partitions, X11 and Gnome. I didn’t want my system to have anything experimental, because I knew I had to learn a bunch of stuff anyway. Just made everything as simple as possible, so that I can understand what’s going on.
  So far, there hasn’t been a lot of system maintenance. Obviously it’s still more than what a Debian system would require, but nothing too crazy.
  
  Nothing too complex, no. KDE desktop, some stuff from the AUR. LVM on LUKS.
  Perhaps it's more fair to say that Arch takes more effort to maintain than any other well known distro except Gentoo (or LFS, if one considers that well known).
  I found keeping up to date on a fairly bleeding edge rolling release distro exhausting. I would, too often, come across issues with updates that required manual intervention to solve. And the AUR can be a crapshoot as far maintainers keeping them up to date and applying fixes. Nothing unmanagable, but not an enjoyable experience for me.
  No hate intended on Arch though. I think it's one of the best distros out there, and the Linux community as a whole is better off for it's existence. But it's not something I want as my daily driver, and I suspect from what OP wrote, it might be the same case for them.
  Edit: Reworded AUR bit for clarity.

I'd suggest you give this article a read. If this does sound appealing to you, go right ahead. If you think you'd be frustrated with having to make all these changes, Arch likely isn't something for you.
- This is just not true at all. This level of configuration is in no way required for having a good usable system. Things are as hard as they are plus how hard you make them.