When I say arch I mean the arch distro and all of its offspring.
Endeavouros
Arch-gui
Manjaro
Artix --maybe not though
My first enjoyable distro was manjaro, the manjaro element less so but using arch clicked for me. But even so if my first experience was using arch and archinstall then yes its not the easiest but its also not that difficult, arch is treated like a boss battle in darksouls.
So when a pre configured GUI arch is recommend I would like to see less scar mongering.
How long have you been using Manjaro? How long had you been using Linux before you tried Manjaro? Were you using it during one of the 4 times they let their SSL certificate expire? Have you been using it for long enough to have AUR packages break because of the planned delay?
Here’s the thing, Arch distros are bleeding edge, and they make assumptions about the user behind the keyboard, one of those assumptions is that you will read the arch news, for example just looking at the news in the homepage now, if you had been using budgie desktop you would have encountered a problem preventing you from updating just a few months back https://archlinux.org/news/budgie-desktop-1072-6-update-requires-manual-intervention/ . This is not serious or unexpected, in fact if I saw the error that comes from that I would immediately know what to do without having read that news, but a newbie using Manjaro and their graphical UI would just be frustrated that their system is not updating anymore. And making matters worse if they asked on an arch forum about it they would essentially be told that they’re using Manjaro and should ask on a Manjaro forum, and since those are way less active it would be a while before someone told them what to do, if they ever managed to get the output to explain the actual issue. And that’s just one example, Arch distros break backwards compatibility daily, it’s just not expected that you’ll have packages out of date, so anything you installed manually might just break, whereas other distros are a lot more careful about what they upgrade.
I wouldn’t recommend manjaro, the devs have made way too many mistakes. Hense I crossed out manjaro in the list.
Did you read the rest? The HTTPS one is the only specific manjaro thing, most points apply to all Arch based distros.
I did but you mention menjaro a lot it felt as if you’d skipped what I had posted.
Ive used Linux since Ubuntu 12 but had no understanding of the deep Linux system so I never stuck with it, then budgie came out (the os) which was great but limited, soon after moved to manjaro where I found out aur packages would brick my machine so move on to arch where I have stayed. Ive not had many issues and when I do I know how to handle them, ive never looked at arch news (maybe a sign of complacency) but even so ive been able to fix what minimal issues ive had (in my experience)
For some people who are new user, having system with more controls is a compelling position, one that the community needs to understand and not repeat the same 3 distros or chew out others for suggesting arch.
If a new user shows genuine interest beyond web browsing then arch and its variant deserve a mention.