Comment by Sunspark
4 years ago
Arch is only a recommendation for people with a fair bit of experience. I have some experience, and I still needed to check some webpages to find out what I was missing when I tried installing Arch as the official manual doesn't spell out every step that is needed.
For "easy" for people who don't have time or experience, I would instead recommend Pop!_OS https://pop.system76.com/ flash a liveusb stick and you can try it out on your hardware without needing to install it first.
I've been using Ubuntu for over a decade because my days of fiddling with my computer to get things to work are over. In general, Ubuntu just works without much configuration on the user's end.
I've noticed a trend where people who are new to Linux will jump on Arch because they believe it'll give them more power, or that they'll learn more by using it. Or people will install Kali because they think it is what hackers use, and completely miss the fact that Kali isn't meant to be installed at all.
It's all Linux under the hood, and you get the same amount of power no matter which distro you use. And when you use a distro with sane defaults like Ubuntu, you're able to dig into the internals whenever it suits you, and not because an update broke your computer.
The biggest problem with Linux is not enough people use it so you run into all kinds of edge cases with hardware and software. I just stick with Ubuntu because it's the most popular, so the most likely someone bumps their head on the problem before I do, and maybe I find their stack exchange question or bug report when I search.
I've been very happy with Ubuntu 20.04. Not without issues, but overall it's been quite stable and snappy (pun intended) and I prefer it to macos and windows.
Arch is neat, and their documentation and forums are amazingly great. However, I have zero desire to be my laptop's sysadmin. Pop! OS runs great on my Thinkpad.
If you have a simple setup and friendly hardware (e.g. all Intel), the sysadmin burden is super low.
In this regard, only NixOS compares. Even macOS is much much worse, as you need to go through upgrades. I have used the same Arch install for 8 years.
If the only concern is the install process, I would recommend Manjaro. It has its own installer, but you still get the powerful pacman package manager and the Arch repositories which are the most cutting-edge around.
I've had Manjaro bork itself a couple of times. I'd recommend against it.