I finally tried arch, and my long list of custom manual shenanigans was reduced to packman + aur. I'm seriously impressed, and it gave me a renewed hope for OSS.
I've used Linux, Windows and MacOS. For what an operating system does, the only flaw Linux has is due to lack of software and driver availability, neither of which has anything to do with the operating system itself. Because for what it is, and what it does, Linux and gnome is imo, absolutely excellent.
Even easier, the ArchWiki has detailed steps you can follow along at your own speed, together with links to each topic for a deep dive (which isn't required, but nice to have when you do need it). Reading through and following the "Installation Guide" + "General Recommendations" pages would take you 2-3 hours at most, and you'll end up with a fully installed and ready system :)
Things I like about arch: it's stable and up to date. It's stable because fixes by upstream developers are not being blocked by package maintainers that second guess what they are doing. I never understood this being a thing. Mostly all the experts for any software are exactly those people involved with producing the upstream source code. If they say something is stable and ready for use, it generally is. Arch mostly just ships software as is. Nothing more nothing less. Unless the upstream developers release broken and untested software, it generally is the best version of that software available. Basically, Arch does most of the due diligence on ensuring things at least compile, install, and run fine. So generally, it's fine. And if it's not, you just wait and it will be fixed. You always have the option to downgrade. I've never had to do that actually.
Arch is mainstream enough that all the mainstream stuff just works. Docker, snap, steam, etc. Between those, I can run just about anything I need to and get the best experience possible.
Hardware support is constantly improving and with Arch you have early access to kernel releases. I generally am within a few patch releases of the latest stable linux kernel. So, I get the most out of my GPU, CPU, wifi, and other stuff I have. Mostly chances of hardware working decrease with the age of the kernel. Best case, stuff works but with more stability issues and less performance on an older kernel. Worst case, you have stuff that doesn't work at all that you can't get working until your distribution finally updates the kernel. I've updated the kernel mostly without issues. On 1 occasion I went back to the previous version for a week while they sorted out some issues with touchpad support. Not a big deal.
This post made me play around with Arch last night, and specifically the installer. Having spent most of my last dozen years in Debian and Ubuntu, it wasn't as flashy or glamorous, but it got me a running system really quickly. One thing I missed was the network setup - I skipped it, and was left with a VM that had no network access. But after playing with it some, I spun up two VMs - one profiled 'server' and the other 'desktop' - and have really enjoyed the limited time I've had with them. Way back in the day, I spent a lot of time with Gentoo, and while building from scratch wasn't my jam every time (like, when novice me installed `emacs` and not `emacs-nox` and lost two days of compute time), but this scratches the itch I had for lower level control of my system but also with a little bit of shiny knobs and levers.
Installing Arch is the easy part. The maintenance is what gets ya.