Just install EndeavorOS lol

Arch user here.
My recommendation to noobies is always Linux Mint even though I don't use it.
I use Arch, btw.
- Yeah I think Arch is fine, but I'd never recommend it to a new Linux user.
  
  Most Arch users (myself included) don't recommend Arch to n00bs or even light seasoned Linux users if they already are happy with their setup.
  But the meme is the meme and I like bullying Arch elitists.
- Indeed, besides most linux distributions are fairly equally lightweight and can be customized. I tried 4-5 distros this past January (Arch being one) when I got my new gaming laptop and they all booted in 9.5 sec for example, and perform equally well in general, they had fairly similar RAM load with the same desktop environment.
  Arch is about managing the system as a hobby, which is fine.
  One problem here is that new users install Endeavour/Garuda but don't know how to manage updates safely about pacnew/pacsave/etc. So the system might slowly "rot" without them knowing about it because new components use old configs, etc..
  I also recommend Mint to new users. I don't use Mint, nor do I use Arch.
  
  Arch is about managing the system as a hobby
  You're thinking of Gentoo.
  
  Tbf I don't think many people know about pacdiff. The way I found out about it was by looking up a warning about pacnew/pacsave during an upgrade, because I was bored. Very random.
  
  Arch is about managing the system as a hobby, which is fine.
  Only the installation takes more time, maintenance is no longer than the noob friendly ones.
- Hey, you're on the wrong Lemmy instance. :P
  
  I so want to join that one :D Brilliant name.
  ... Then go back to Gentoo and stay anyway :P
- I use both, but Mint is strictly better if you want a no-fuss system that just works and will continue to do so
- As a seasoned distrohopper, can confirm. When I try something new, I always ask myself: Would a noob be ok with the fact that in this distro you have to do things this way. In Fedora, Debian, Manjaro and so many other I always end up saying “no” more than a few times. With Mint, you just don’t bump into these situations very often. IMO, Mint is the best starter distro for most users. If you know your friend is very technical, you can recommend something else.
- I finally tried out Linux Mint this year at work (we use Fedora for some of our different tasks). It arms like such a nice experience out of the box, and I’d put it on a family computer in a second.
- Mint was my first used, was straightforward and easy to get going. Still use mint.
  I've always read it doesn't really matter what distro you choose, just to pick one you like. That's confusing to a noob because they don't know why they should or shouldn't like a specific one.
  Mint is very simple to setup and works very much like a windows PC by default. Can even set it up to work like a Mac if you want to.
- Yep. LM or Ubuntu is my recommendation to newbies

Isn't archwiki one of the most comprehended wikis for Linux distros out there? If anything, the arch-wiki (to me) has often too many answers for the same problem than the other way around.
- [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
  
  I switched like ten years ago because I wanted to learn the details, but in all honesty I still feel like I barely understand anything. Not sure how normal this is, maybe I'm unusually dumb, but I feel like what I've really learned is how to troubleshoot and solve issues by reading documentation and tinkering, rather than understanding what I'm actually doing. I've had a stable system for years but I kind of feel like if a typical arch forum poster looked my system configuration for five minutes they'd be like wtf are you doing.
  
  Is actually great since it forces you to learn which saves you much more time in the long run.
  But most people can't see past their nose.
  Edit
  Can't believe somebody got offended by this...
- I run Debian and I regularly look at the Arch wiki.
- It is most comprehended, but for newbie it is too comprehensive. Its overwhelming, I tried to troubleshoot why I boot to black screen even the installation said its successful and there's no error. I saw solutions that want me edit grub, edit xorg ... and some other file that I never understand.
  I understand the wiki is very good and very important, its just not newbie friendly.
- That's the issue. Arch and it's wiki are labyrinths for beginners.
  For anyone not interested in tinkering all-day long they're better off using fedora, debian or suse.
- True

A lot of new users are coming to Linux not because they like tinkering with their setup but because they are tired of Microsoft tinkering with their setup. For these people Arch will probably never be the answer. That's ok, we should encourage all Linux adoption and the best way to do that is to start with the simple and familiar.
- I mean, who doesn't love to have candy crush and facebook automatically bundled with their OS? I mean, I had a fantastic two years waiting for the never combine taskbar feature to be released. The never-ending prompt to make edge my default browser is also utterly refreshing. m$ is so ahead of the game, they even anticipated my needs by shoving onedrive prompts in my control panel. How about that Office 365? Have you tried it yet? No? Well you're missing out my man, in case you change your mind I'm going to put it right there in the front page of settings so you'll never miss it.
- I switched a few weeks ago, it was because my computer is slower than a toaster and windows was tanking it down even more I installed xubuntu, well I must say it's ok, after I finished setting stuff up I realised I should've just gone for debian with xfce (I tried to install kubuntu-deskop on my xubuntu installation just to try how would kde run on my pc, it ran as well as windows did, but was just a tiny tiny bit faster, the way I installed it was probably bad and it could've been the way I installed it tho)
  And yeah, I definitely love tinkering with stuff so this wasthe obvious choice

Weird shot at the Arch wiki, which is truly great. I turn to it regularly despite not using Arch.

heres the thing: as a decade+ software dev, I never want to even think about my distro.
I just want Linux terminal style commands, and Linux style ssh shit to just work in the most middle of the road way as possible. I'm trying to get a job done, not build a personality.
- Exactly. That's why i use Mint. I don't want to think about my operating system, I want to get stuff done.
- This is me too and why I no longer use Arch btw.
  
  I used Arch for AUR, but with flatpak getting more popular these last few years even the more niche stuff I had to rely on AUR for got a flatpak. So I've been trying out immutable distros like Fedora Kinoite.
- This is why I got a MacBook (unpopular opinion here)
  
  I only ever have Mac stuff from employers, but it is nice hardware and linux-like enough for me to be happy.
  Probably also helps Mac that every windows machines provided by an employer is some random HP buttbook that looks and preforms like it could be from 2021 or 2012, who knows
  
  Macs are not really what I think of when reading "middle of the road linux"
- Same here fam

Wiki do not have answer
?? The arch wiki is one of the greatest Linux resources out there. Sure there may be situations where it doesn't have the answer for something, but for a new user? It has all bases covered.
- It's actually really great.. if you know how to interpret and apply the information on it to your situation and adapt as needed. A good new user experience it does not make however.
- On one hand, the archlinux bbs had the only exact reference to the issue I was having. On the other hand, no one could replicate it enough to figure anything out. :/
- I agree. I don't use Arch (I have in the past) but I use Arch Wiki heavily.
- im pretty sure the OP never took a look at Arch and just follow the hate movement

Ex arch btw user here. I noped out and wiped after thinking I had it all nailed down, then I tried to connect my Bluetooth headphones and I came to a grand awakening. I am too old for this shit.
Installed Tumbleweed and been happy ever since.
- Tumbleweed is boring, and that's why it's wonderful.
- I am too old for this shit.
  You don't even have to be old; just wise.
- Tumbleweed is great, but I prefer EndeavorOS myself.
  
  Starbucks coffee is great, but I prefer vicious, unrelenting cock and ball torture myself.
- I just installed Nextcloud on Arch and the official packages caused the most headaches I ever had within my 3 years of arch. In contrast I installed the official Jellyfin and Prometheus Server packages and they ran OOTB.
  I ended up with not using the official packages but extracting the tar.bz2 into /var/www/nextcloud and slightly modifying the nginx config from their site. I had to move the inclusion of the MIME-Types file to a different block for nextcloud to deliver its CSS, SVGs and images. It wasn't exactly straight-forward too considering permissions. I found it a beast compared to many other server software.
  
  ngl, I love how "I don't give a fuck" the slackware authors are, they didn't even bother with https on their official website.
- Its probably just one package. I guess for example pacman -S plasma-desktop plasma-meta flatpak fish plasma-wayland-session sddm sddm-kcm && systemctl enable --now sddm does the trick.
  Archinstall with the entire plasma desktop is probably also nice, or just EndeavorOS which will be preconfigured
  
  I actually did the whole KDE shebang with archinstall. I never really expected that Arch btw deigned it too opinionated to just provide an audio and Bluetooth interface. Instead I have to choose between pulse audio and pipewire and bluez and a bunch of others. I just didn’t have the patience nor time to look into what and why these options are presented, and this was after I already wasted days figuring how to get my pc to boot with my 12th gen Intel and Nvidia gpu combination.
  Turns out there’s a bunch of kernel finagling you absolutely have to do first before it even decides to boot from the gpu and not the igpu. Oh well.

For a total newbie, Linux Mint or PopOS are probably the best options. But EndeavourOS is getting there. There shouldn't be any issues during the installation if one sticks to the defaults. Only thing is, it doesn't come with a graphical package manager out of the box. But once that is installed (I think anyone will be happy to write a single terminal command, at least), I don't see why it's any harder to use than any other distro.
- Mint, with any DE, does come with a graphical package manager. It's as easy as any appstore. The only confusion is it suggests both it's original and flatpack versions to install.
  I think you are talking about EndevourOS there.
  
  Yeah, I'm talking about EndeavourOS. I don't see what got you confused.

I use Ubuntu. It generally tends to be boring stable, which is kinda what I want out of my OS these days. I can still customize it, and even break it if I really get bored, but it's nice to have things just work for the most part.
- Yep, games being designed to support Ubuntu first is a big reason why I'm so far into Ubuntu. I could easily switch if I needed to since I'm both a programmer and very comfortable with Linux but for me, it does everything I need an OS to do.

I had a friend who wanted to try linux but insisted on arch because it's what I used at the time even though I said they shouldn't and gave many suggestions for better distros. They gave up after about a day and went back to windows. I don't know what they expected, multiple people warned them not to use arch.
- multiple people warned them not to use arch.
  My IT Bros said the same back when I had to choose W10 or Linux, they haven't used arch and I had 0 Linux experience. I messed up every single step of the installation to a point where I knew from the problems I created what I did wrong. After many tries and a week later I had a working installation with dual boot. Never used windows and removed it a year later. It was rough but I learned how to recover from most errors a user can create.
  If learning is the goal arch and arch-wiki is great.
  
  That's right. It's a great recommendation for learning about Linux.
  For anyone who needs something that just works, there's a lot better options.
- I've been off windows for a long time, and when I was forced to use it, it was enterprise, locked down and stripped by knowledgeable IT teams.
  Yesterday, I had my first exposure to Win 11 S mode. What a piece of crap. Not just the way its locked down, but the incessant Onedrive ads, broken settings app with missing features, AI buzzword addons, sloppy UI and general lack of control over your own computer.
  Recommending my friend install Linux ASAP with my support. Nobody should have to endure that much cruft and garbage on their owned computer. They can't even install software outside of the MS store? Gross.
  
  Oh yeah no I was not at all saying windows was better, I was just saying arch was definitely not a good distribution for beginners and it was weird how one just insisted on using it. I use arch on my laptop and opensuse tumbleweed on my desktop and have not used windows for anything serious in years because it is so unbearable.
- Should've recommended Arch-based distro like Manjaro. It's Arch, and you don't need to use TTY for installation. And they can claim they use Arch btw.
  
  I actually recommended endeavor as an option if I remember correctly but they wouldn't try it
  
  Manjaro has some issues, endeavourOS is better
- I love Arch but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. In my eyes, the only way one should choose Arch is despite all warnings against it, because they feel confident enough to deal with all the problems they encounter.
  
  Honestly I've had so little trouble with arch compared to other things, so I would definitely recommend it to experienced linux users, just definitely not unexperienced users. The aur is amazing and rolling release means you don't have to deal with the horrors of major updates breaking packages. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is also a great candidate though for people who don't want to set as many things up themself, I'm currently using both arch and tumbleweed on different computers

I will always recommend Debian or Debian based distros to anyone new to Linux. They'll find their way to arch eventually
Arch btw

I will not stand slander of the arch wiki.
Also start with Linux Mint XFCE (unless they've fixed the stability problems with cinnamon)
- When I started using LM I had a lot of problems, but switching to XFCE fixed most of them

Arch wiki is the reason I started using Arch. After fixing an install from something I found there for like the 10th time I thought "Why not give it a try"

I don't have any issue with Arch, everything works. But when I try other distros, they are mostly messed up.
- Many distros do their own packaging on their repos, adding dependencies and custom-builds with custom configurations, and this often breaks my OS. On arch, this doesn't happen to me. What's your experience?

If the arch wiki doesn't have the answer, I just give up
- The most unrealistic part of this
  
  It does have the answer, you just can't find it

My first ever distro was Arch, over a decade ago.
I just consider it my trial by fire, everything has been smooth sailing since because anything else is easier!
- Red hat, 25 years ago learned to recompile the kernel to make my sound card/modem work.
  
  25 years into the future and my biggest issue regarding sound is having to tell pipewire to stop going into standby since I do not enjoy the white noise coming from my speakers if it does.
- Especially a decade ago before archinstall
  These days it is comparatively easy.

"Wiki do not have answer" that's why the wiki is also used by non-arch users ?
- Ay this is a funny meme and all but insulting the best linux documentation available was unnecessary
  
  yep

Bruh, if you're going to insist on someone installing arch, at least sit by their side and walk them through it.
Having installed arch multiple times before, I can get a base system with networking and desktop environment up in half a day to a day depending on which DE.
- Is that... fast? Haha but yes of course it helps
  
  I'm not saying it's particularly fast, but having someone who knows what they are doing drastically reduces the time.
  I could probably make it quicker if I set up a bunch of scripts for initial installation.
  That said the whole point of arch is DIY, lightweight - people forget the kinda of people arch is for, then complain about how long it takes to install. If you complain about install times, then the distro is not for you. (For more about the point of arch, see the arch way https://principles.design/examples/the-arch-way)
  But it can be a great platform for learning about the inner workings of your typical Linux system, and that's why it's great. If you're willing to learn and look things up it can be the best option.
  If you want it here and now with no fuss ,it's the third worst system to use- followed by Gentoo and lastly, LFS.
  And heck once it's installed you can be as pedantic or as lazy as you want - my main system has had the same install of arch for multiple years - it's a mess and I havent really maintained it well, I just fix it when it breaks and use it like a regular system. It's just the set up process that takes the most effort.
- I can have windows up in 15 minutes
  
  Really? It always took me an hour including forced update, and from a usb
- Or, just use Endeavor OS and be done with it. It uses the Upstream repositories, the only thing in their customer repositories are some desktop wallpapers and a theme so you can safely remove it without breaking anything. It's a great way to get a base system in a known good configuration up quickly and from there the arch Wiki can help you tweak things to your desire it's a much better way to learn than just throwing someone into the deep end of the pool

Ok look I'm not a huge Arch fan either (it's great for learning the ins and outs of Linux but I've gotten to the point that stability is more important than anything to me) but the wiki is the most thorough Linux documentation you can get anywhere. It always, always has the answer, even if you don't use Arch, lol.

Start with Debian stable (rock solid, well integrated packaging).
When you feel comfortable and have achieved some experience, switch to Debian sid (rolling release, updates very often, be a bit cautious).
- A Debian blend like SpiralLinux might be better for less technical people. Debian is one of my favorite distros but it's pretty bare bones and requires some configuration to become an everday usage desktop.
  
  In what way?
- This

Arch is easy to install; it's a headache to manage.
If you want a stable Arch, you need to check the updates and take very granular control over packages and versioning.
While some nerds may like tinkering with their system in all those ways, for regular user Arch is simply too much effort to maintain.
- Informant
  
  Useful, but still it kinda makes you read through all the update news, which is...why?
  I'd like to just hit update and not bother.
- It is actually very easy:
  You setup auto-snapshots (almost trivial)
  You update
  Evaluate
  3.1) Repeat goto 2
  3.2) Rollback goto 2
  The only problem here is that snapshots (and btrfs for that matter) are not the default behaviour. I would really appreciate Endeavour having this as the default setup. It is very likely what you'd want.
  
  True, but if snapshots turn from first line of catastrophe response to a regular tool, this is not a good experience.
  Also I believe Garuda has enabled snapshots and btrfs by default.

More Endeavour recommendations

I always say Ubuntu, to make the haters snap
- groaaaan...
- Its not a very good OS. Very opinionated, weird modded GNOME, nonstandard Snap doing weird stuff. But its probably okayish and pretty stable

I don't get the hate arch gets - it's the perfect distro if you want to choose what programs you want to use, it's not meant to be an out of the box experience. Been using it for 3 years, and sure it might take me a couple of hours to set up initially, but after that I don't really have to do anything.
- It's awful for most new users, though. They don't even know what the options are, how can they choose anything?
  Not every new user is the same but if they are absolute newbies they should start with a user friendly distro, which Arch definitely isn't.
  
  I fully agree that it's bad for users who aren't that tech-savvy, but I meant it in a more general sense - during my time on Lemmy I've seen a ton of posts bashing arch and commenters pretty much calling it a "good for nothing distro", with the only more hated distro being Manjaro.
- I think Arch kind of deserves the hate it gets. I love barebones distros and have been a gentoo user (now on NixOS), and I’ve used arch a fair bit too… I just don’t feel like Arch is a well maintained distribution. There’s all sorts of little things that they can’t seem to get right that other distros do, like that silly issue where they won’t update the arch keyring first, so if you haven’t updated in a while it breaks. In my experience there’s a million little paper cuts like this and I’ve just been kind of unimpressed. If it works for you that’s great! I’ve just been disappointed with it. I get the niche that it fills as the binary “from scratch” rolling release distro, but I think the experience with it is a little rough. I’ve found gentoo more user friendly, which probably sounds bizarre if you haven’t used gentoo, but ignoring compiling stuff, gentoo does an excellent job of not breaking things on updates, and it’s much easier to pin and install specific versions of packages and stuff.
  
  @Chobbes
  Looks like you haven't been using Arch for quite some time now. That used to be the case, nowdays it's way better experience. I've been using Arch for about 11 yrs now and I can see that improvement is noticable. Still not THE BEST, but waaaay better.
- I have not used it for a long time but it's really easy to fuck the install and potentially your entire system, depending on the fuckup(s).
  As a matter of fact, that is exactly why I used it the first time : since it's a nice lightweight distro and it has some interesting gotchas regarding installation, our sysadmin teacher had us all install it and set it up before we could actually use our distro of choice
  
  It's a great distro to learn a lot about Linux. I challenged myself to install it on my Surface Go 2, and make it usable as a tablet, as well as make it boot with secure boot and more. Now it's happily running Arch with KDE, using the linux-surface kernel signed with my own secure boot key and a pacman hook that signs that kernel after every update. I learned all of this acompanied by a lot of fuckups and reinstalls, until I was able to fix things after breaking them instead of starting from scratch.

Nvidia?
More like:
Nie-wieder!

Moved from Fedora > Arch > Manjaro > Fedora > Debian. I consider Arch for learning purposes. For troubleshooting / recoveries , that knowledge will be a great help.
- My lifecycle was roughly Gentoo, Mandrake, SUSE, Debian (sid), Arch, Vector, Arch, Debian (testing), Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Arch, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Fedora, and finally Debian (stable).
  I used to like to mess around with the newest shiniest software but now I just want it to not be broken.
- Funny how it is all relative...
  Red hat for a few months -> Gentoo for 10 years-> Arch for another 10 years
  For me this is the opposite: Every time I am forced to use Ubuntu I feel like I am in a torture chamber especially with 3rd party packages.
- My path have been Slackware > Mint > Kubuntu > Arch > Kubuntu > Arch.
  I forsee myself switching between a "care free" distro and Arch many times in the future.

Arch wasn't my first distro but it was my first daily driver. Found it easier than both mint and Ubuntu personally.
- Lol.

Arch is great, but I'm too lazy to learn how to set it up. Once it's running I think Arch is amazing. I just use Garuda Linux and love it. The Arch wiki is an amazing ressource.
- I used EndavourOS for a while until I realized I didn't use any of the distros features after the installation.
  archinstall is basically just a text menu with the same option as a GUI installer.
  I ended up with a vanilla arch install with my preferred DE. Drivers installed, network configured. Ready to go.

Is this from 2010?

archinstall
- 15 minutes from booting the ISO to a Plasma installation is probably average. There are probably people who've done speed runs in 5 minutes. archinstall has gotten so good.

This is more or less my experience with it. My noob-ass just can't handle even EndeavorOS.
- What problems did you run into?
  
  Trying to install a lot of shit, primarily. I figured out that a lot of programs that I wanted were only available (to my knowledge) in .deb format which I couldn't get working in the distro, That and I'm still not used to using the terminal to install anything. Literally the only thing I miss from Windows is using wizards to install things. I understand a lot of this is purely skill issue though.
- Try Manjaro if you haven't already.
  It's more popular than endeavor, but has way fewer shills.
  
  I might consider it next time I have time to kill and the motivation to mess with anything arch-related.
  
  Since Endeavour is just Arch with a graphical installer and a few extra tools, I‘d say it’s way more popular.
  
  Can't wait for the manjaro bot network to DDOS the AUR again...

Use endeavour if you're new

Only people with time to lose use Arch.
- i disagree, aur save big time
  
  Once you have distrobox set up with an arch container, you have access to the aur no matter what distro ypu're running.
- Normally I have the valet bring the PC around but I let him go early today 'cause it's his birthday.
- Once you learn about Linux, you go faster than any other noob. And that is very useful for programming/hacking jobs, faster than all those noobs with 0 knowledge about what is what.

Basically, most of the points there fall into some of 3 categories:
Your hardware is crap:
WiFi not working;
Nvidia failed;
You ability to read/follow simple instructions is crap:
WiFi not working;
Messed up installation;
Nvidia failed;
No answer in the wiki;
Lies/outdated:
Updater broke system;
Troubleshoot everything;
No answer in the wiki;
- This guy Arches
  
  I use Arch and I lol'd.
  
  I Arched for like 4 years or so, and now I NixOS. Got somewhat tired of modifying configs in 100500 places and eventually forgetting what exactly I've changed 😅
  Nevertheless, I still think arch is great, and, as a side note, it does provide a good understanding of Linux on the upper-low level (not like LFS or even gentoo, but still very much viable).
- About 3, idk what's going on with my system, but sometimes after a big yay update, the kde login fails (something about the plasma environment failing to boot or idk I have not debugged it correctly yet), then after a reboot systemd-boot fails to load it and the efi entry dissapears. I'm forced to arch-chroot and reinstall the bootctl. After doing so, sometimes I have to do it again and other times it logs correctly.
  Again, not debugged it correctly but it's not like I did any kind of weird change to any config, just installed some flatpaks, some steam games, and lutris for League, which in the end is basically wine, and a yay update provoking this behaviour is pretty bad.
  
  I've had this happen. I never did figure it out, personally. I distro hopped a bit and eventually ended up back on Arch and it didn't happen again, so I guess it was a bugged install?
  Journalctl might be a great friend here.
  
  I've personally encountered mentioned behavior with kde on both arch and kde neon, so I'm inclined to think it's their f-up. As for sd-boot, I'm not sure: I've used it on arch for a short while only, and then just ditched bootloaders altogether for efistub
- If I have to edit a config file, this means the OS is a failed piece of garbage
  
  I could say inability to edit a config file is worth reevaluating of what is a failed piece of garbage here... But it won't be fair. If you don't want to deal with configs, go ahead and use chromeos or something :P
  Jokes aside, pop-os is great ootb.
  
  I've kind of come and gone full circle on this one. It fits in the same space as the terminal, way more useful when you know what you want.
  Some config files are a lot easier to get the behavior I want, but editing a poorly formatted (or in some some cases pointlessly complicated) config is a quick nope out.
  Too many options to learn a new language.

I've used Ubuntu for many years, it is a good start for beginners. Although my new recommendations is Mint.

- You could use the eggplant emoji if you flip it both ways.
- PS.

Currently on second day of troubleshooting installation. (Hopefully) 5 days to go till I finally get to boot

The one and only time I said "oh hell naw" to a distro install. Mid install.
- Smart man.

Don't know what people have? The last time wifi didnt work out of the box for me was like 2010
- Broadcom, it's always broadcom's fault
- Ugh I had to get an obscure PCIe card working a few years back and it was a huge pain. I believe I ended up having to find the broadcom chipset by model because the generic brand driver didn't support it, then the arch repos didn't have the driver for the model, and there were several aur packs available that I had to try one by one. And it was kernel module loaded, so each was a reboot.
  Absolute hell of a time, probably about 5 years ago.
- My Ideapad Gaming 3 with a 3060 didn't have Wifi working out of the box.
  For awhile I had to install a kernel module everytime I updated Linux to get Wifi working. Thankfully I found what I needed on Github the day I got the laptop.
- I've got two Linux boxes that I got new, different, wifi cards for recently. Turns out both those cards have the same Intel AX200 chip which has had a variety of problems causing frequent dropouts that the community has slowly nutted out since I've had them, including requiring a kernel patch.
  The two big ones are a faulty default power saving mode, and problems talking to a Wireless n router when in WiFi 5 mode.

I'm wondering why "I use Funtoo btw" didn't become a meme, and arch did. Gentoo is objectively better at letting the user customise everything compared to arch
- I'm pretty sure it's because less people use it. They make fun of Gentoo taking longer to compile stuff on install/update, but that's pretty fast nowadays. What really takes up time is making all the choices. I remember hours of selecting obscure kernel options and choosing use flags "what is ncurses? Do i need ncurses? What is sdl? Do i need sdl? ..." I mostly use Ubuntu now, because I got no more time for that.
  
  I honestly had no idea how to do use flags and just gave up on gentoo since a lot of things I wanted to install needed me to tinker with them somehow, but I might try again later on.
  
  There are binary versions of heavy stuff at least. Although, yeah, it kinda becomes tedious once you get into more or less obscure options... Mine was compiling everything with musl (for some reason)
- Gentoo had their own meme: Gentoo is for ricers.
  
  That's a classic.

Is there an easier way to install Arch? I know there's Archinstall but my dumbass messed that up somehow.
- EndeavourOS is it. It's basically a better version of archinstall, especially if you're planning to install a DE.
- I used endeavourOS and it was super straightforward
  
  When you boot up the arch iso, you can use a script called arch-install
- Archintstall sometimes produces problems(at least I had problems with it). Make sure that you have the current iso version of arch on your stick and try again.
  
  The problem I was facing was manually creating partitions. Should I use Gparted to make them first and then use archinstall, or does it not work with manual partitions?
- EndeavorOS or other. Artix maybe? But never used any of those
- If you use EndeavourOS, know that you shouldn't ask for support on the Arch forums, its a policy they have.

Well there is always Scientific Linux if arch doesn't quite cut it

This is so ooooold. :D
- Sometimes people need reminders because they forget how much work they put in.

Endeavor or Garuda?
- I'm on like day 2 of Garuda. Ran into corrupted packages during the install which wasn't fun, but it's up and running now. I'm hoping that maintaining it isn't as much of a time suck as it sounds like pure Arch is.

So if someone starts using EndeavorOS daily, can they claim to be an arch user? Edit: I'm now wiping my laptop clean and using it as my daily driver from now on. This is probably my first experience with Plasma, and I am loving it way more than gnome so far.
- Yeah, but don't tell other arch users you are using EndavorOS... jk!
- Yup my best Plasma experience was on Manjaro, Arch based KDE is just good. But actually modern KDE at all is just good, so no Kubuntu or damn MXLinux XD
  
  Oh my God the more I use it the more amazing it is already. The customization in the Plasma appearance settings is exactly what I've missed this whole time. I feel like I've wasted all these years now. Better late than never I s'pose.

I'd just recommend Fedora.
I use Fedora BTW.
- Oh you mean the IBM Enterprise Linux upstream? Is that ok to use on a desktop computer?
  (I'm just kidding, Fedora's great.)
- Same. Kinoite-main from ublue, works out of the box

Install Debian. Everything is based on it.
- It's a hard sell explaining to new people that they will have software up to a couple years out of date.
  
  Yet they scream when their 6 months old un-updated windows install wants then to update
  
  My brother is a Linux first-timer, and he specifically asked me to install Debian after I explained that it's stability-focused, but as such sacrifices functional updates and is only globally updated once every two years.
  Some people need latest and greatest (i.e. here's your Arch), some need stability over everything (i.e. here's your Debian), some don't need extremes and strike a balance somewhere in between (i.e. everything else).
  I use Manjaro (Arch-based) on main PC and Debian on a work laptop. Main PC should better enjoy all the benefits of all things new (while standing a week or two behind bleeding-edge to not cut itself, which is Manjaro's selling point) while work laptop is mission critical and can work perfectly fine with what Debian has to offer, so, Debian it is.
- Derpian

I often use Arch in a container, when I need a fhs distro. EndeavourOS is great for desktop use if you don't want to go through the Arch install process.
DeltaChat is an awesome messenger. It's federated, quick and simple to use. Also, I didn't realize DC was on the fediverse for so many years.
- What do you mean Delta chat is on the fediverse?
  
  I meant that Delta Chat has a mastodon account for at least 5 years: https://chaos.social/@delta
- The first part is about the meme. Arch has it's (dis-)advantages depending on the use case.
  I wrote the second part because OP mentioned they've found the meme "at deltachat", which is a email-based messenger I use. It's a topic adjacent to linux as it's open source software with linux support.
  https://delta.chat/

My first ever distro was EndeavourOS. I installed it when I was 13 or 14 years old because someone on reddit said it's customizable. I never felt like I need to switch to anything else.