Arch is aimed at people who know their shit so they can build their own distro based on how they imagine their distro to be. It is not a good distro for beginners and non power users, no matter how often you try to make your own repository, and how many GUI installers you make for it. There's a good reason why there is no GUI installer in arch (aside from being able to load it into ram). That being that to use Arch, you need to have a basic understanding of the terminal. It is in no way hard to boot arch and type in archinstall. However, if you don't even know how to do that, your experience in whatever distro, no matter how arch based it is or not, will only last until you have a dependency error or some utter and total Arch bullshit® happens on your system and you have to run to the forums because you don't understand how a wiki works.
You want a bleeding edge distro? Use goddamn Opensuse Tumbleweed for all I care, it is on par with arch, and it has none of the arch stuff.
You have this one package that is only available on arch repos? Use goddamn flatpak and stop crying about flatpak being bloated, you probably don't even know what bloat means if you can't set up arch. And no, it dosent run worse. Those 0,0001 seconds don't matter.
You really want arch so you can be cool? Read the goddamn 50 page install guide and set it up, then we'll talk about those arch forks.
(Also, most arch forks that don't use arch repos break the aur, so you don't even have the one thing you want from arch)
Linux Mint.
MX is better than Mint.
AFAIK no systemd -> no flatpak -> don't recommend to newbs. Say what you will about flatpak, but it is the official distribution method for some popular pieces of software and large GUI software generally works better through it (in my experience) - think Blender, GIMP etc.
also systemd is just assumed in 99% of Linux tutorials and questions.
No software worth its salt offers only flatpak installation. I don't use flatpak at all and Blender works flawlessly. I'm not sure what a flatpak version could possibly do any better than the version I use.
The official OBS flatpak supports more codecs and integrations than some distro packages.
Stability is also a factor, especially on rolling or cutting edge distros. Fedora RPM release of Blender did not work for me at all with an nvidia GPU, for example.
No flavour of Linux works well with them. That's the joke or something.
funnily enough, i see it as one of the advantages of arch, and a reason i'll keep putting up with the constant updating for the forseeable future - nvidia support has gotten way better recently, and since arch has very recent packages i haven't had nvidia issues in quite a while now.
Once it all lands in debian i'll consider giving debian another shot on desktop... but that'll take a while.
Debian SID?
And then wonder why everybody having a good time with their nvidia on smooth wayland vs you on your ~~ancient~~, ok now only old Kernel since the last ubuntu upgrade, and outdated nvidia drivers.
Oh wait, with mint, you are forced to use clunky Xorg aren’t you
I am sure that gives any noob the vibes of using a modern OS like windows/macOS /s
I'm not sure a newcomer will notice the difference between xorg and wayland?
I did, before I knew what wayland is, I did some distrohopping (see path below), and recognised that sometimes it feels more nice than other times. First I thought it was just GPU driver stuff, but later learned that it was something called wayland that does something underneath your desktop management (didn’t know that there is another layer below at that time)
(mint->manjaro->manjaro(after it died once)->Opensuse TW(after manjaro died again)->Arch(because I liked installing from AUR more than from suse community hub)->EndeavourOS(because I don’t have time to do Arch manually and archinstall was to difficult/time consuming with dualbooting macOS)
If you have multiple monitors with different refresh rates, you'll notice immediately.
Mint works like Windows and has a lot to offer any Windows 10 user who's already using FOSS. And tbh Hypnotix alone justified the install of Mint for me. I got a great IPTV viewer, plus a PC that runs everything I want.
Note: I only regularly want Discord, Firefox, Endless Sky, OpenTTD, RetroArch, and LibreOffice. I'm sure everyone else has different goals.
Windows 10 doesn’t feel like a modern OS…
Then whatever a modern OS is under your model is not an OS I'm willing to use. I've seen Win 11. I'm going to stick with 10, as I stuck with XP through Vista, had a second machine with 7 through 8(.x), and then surrendered and used Win10 when the 32-bit Win7 machine finally stopped working for love or money.