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)
People are recommending arch to beginners? This is genuinely the first time i hear of this trend and Ive been into linux for over 20 years now.
Not once have I heard arch pushed to beginners at my local LUG or any LUG ive attended in other cities or countries.
People usually recommended Ubuntu in the past or Mint. Occasionally Fedora. Then Elementary had some steam. Nowadays the landscape is much more diverse I think.
Maybe there is some folks on the internet who get a kick out of recommending hard things to people who need easy things. To gatekeep and create an exclusive feel. But i think if youre seeing that regularly then you need to reasses where youre spending time. Because core Linux culture has never been that since i can remember. We have always embraced that different distros are appropriate for different use cases. And that has always been our strength.
Unfortunately it's not, on Reddit and now on Lemmy I see lots of people recommending it, they think the installer is the problem so they recommend something that has a GUI installer but is Arch afterwards, without realizing that creates more problem than it solves. And when pressed they even say stuff like "I started with Arch and was fine".
Yeah that latter part of "it was easy for me" in particularly stinks of the elitist attitude i was mentioning. I think its a sign of someone thats not really trying to help but rather to make themselves seem smarter.
If you see lots of it here then I guess this post is fair. But i will standby my remark that if you're seeing a lot of this kind of mentality then you need to reasses where you are hanging out...
Maybe go to a local LUG instead. People are a bit more desperate to actually help others at those usually.