To be honest, I’d say they’re being pretty generous in this case. The category for “Advanced Users” also includes the likes of Debian, RHEL(-clones) and SLE, none of which throw you right into a TUI; unlike Arch* 😅.
Furthermore, while archinstall has done a tremendous job at streamlining the process, the lazy noob that wants to rawdog it, will probably give up on their attempt. Contrast that to the installers of every other non-“Experts” distro, which by virtue of its non-archaic UI would have fulfilled its purpose.
And the troubles go well beyond initialization:
Rolling release cadence with minimal testing amounts to plenty of breakage. To put into perspective, even if it’s not that bad in practice; Arch will break more often than (almost) any other distro on that list.
As the previous point is known to cause plenty of agony, users are implored to stick to these instructions found on the excellent ArchWiki to combat that. While I’m sure Arch users are thankful for the instructions, it’s crazy that it is even required. Note that it’s expected that your Arch system is current and up-to-date. So you have to go through that routine at least once a week.
The amount of packages in its own repositories is relatively slim, all of the other big-shot distros have larger repos. As such, the community relies a lot on other repositories; use of the AUR (in particular) is very prominent. But, as recent news has shown, you shouldn’t blindly trust that. Instead, you ought to look into the PKGBUILDs to ensure it doesn’t do anything shady. While this can make installing software more painful than it has any right to be, updates often involve changes in the PKGBUILD(s). In which case, you’re expected to go over it once again 😅…
There’s more to it than that, but I hope the case has been made pretty clear. With Arch, it’s (almost) as if you’re babysitting the system to ensure it doesn’t shit itself. By contrast; distros like Debian, Fedora and/or openSUSE mostly just work.
In case you wonder why people put up with all that shit, Arch does occupy a (relatively) unique spot if you want the following combined:
Latest and greatest.
Very big (user) repository.
Lean. It comes with almost no defaults. With Arch, there’s no such thing as debloating or anything.
Hence, if you’re looking to build your very own system from (close to) scratch to a highly customized setup that does exactly what you want…, then Arch it is.
Unless...
you enjoy compiling software. In which case, enter Gentoo.
you’re fine with learning a functional DSL for the sake of setting up your system, in which case, enter NixOS. But that’s definitely harder than Arch Linux is.
Can someone explain why every single “distro selection guide” lists Arch as a distro for advanced users?
I suppose because it simply is 😅.
To be honest, I’d say they’re being pretty generous in this case. The category for “Advanced Users” also includes the likes of Debian, RHEL(-clones) and SLE, none of which throw you right into a TUI; unlike Arch* 😅.
Furthermore, while
archinstallhas done a tremendous job at streamlining the process, the lazy noob that wants to rawdog it, will probably give up on their attempt. Contrast that to the installers of every other non-“Experts” distro, which by virtue of its non-archaic UI would have fulfilled its purpose.And the troubles go well beyond initialization:
There’s more to it than that, but I hope the case has been made pretty clear. With Arch, it’s (almost) as if you’re babysitting the system to ensure it doesn’t shit itself. By contrast; distros like Debian, Fedora and/or openSUSE mostly just work.
In case you wonder why people put up with all that shit, Arch does occupy a (relatively) unique spot if you want the following combined:
Hence, if you’re looking to build your very own system from (close to) scratch to a highly customized setup that does exactly what you want…, then Arch it is.
Unless...
Most people won’t read instructions.