I love Arch for its simplicity and performance.
But it just wasn't productive for me to get everyday tasks done. I'm not advanced Linux user, occasionally I'd need hours to get seemingly simple stuff done.
For a hobby desktop, fine. For a work tool as a developer, I moved back to Ubuntu (though I have moments of regret every day).
You either have automation to make things easy to the user, but then it's no longer simple.
Or you require the user to do everything manually, but then it's no longer easy.
Perhaps with a focus on the audience (e.g. a web dev distro), it becomes viable to make sensible compromises on both (easiness & simplicity) that result in a good combination for the user.
Pop_os! is coming from the other direction, but I found I prefer using i3/sway instead as I had trouble configuring certain things about pop.
Only reason I've seen to use anything else is if doing a full desktop installation doesn't make sense, as the installer is largely geared around just installing most everything, or perhaps leaving out a category or two. Beyond that, the documentation is clear, and it's made as easy to use as makes sense without just hiding things behind a black box so that when things go wrong, they REALLY go wrong.
Nice to see some of these newer distros like Arch and Ubuntu are coming along though; choice is good.
One alternate approach I find interesting is that of NixOS: everything is declaratively specified in a single place, so it’s easy to configure stuff, but also easy to see how everything works. I actually tried out NixOS before installing Arch on the aforementioned desktop box, and if it wasn’t for the sheer opaqueness of Nixpkgs I’d still be using it. On the other hand, I can hardly call Nix ‘simple’… as with everything, it’s all tradeoffs, I suppose.
I'm going to try again with a different Ubuntu release as soon as I can find the patience. Where prior lessons have taught me to vandalise automatic update or it'll brick itself in the future.
Ease of use has not been the defining characteristic of Ubuntu.
With arch, sometimes it breaks (not that often), it always is quite clear what went wrong (pacman errors are limpid, logs are clear). You'll find the fix on the Arch Linux News, in the wiki or the forums. Bonus you probably know your system better and as a side effect be more efficient in fixing it.
We've seen many failures during upgrade, from both novice and advanced linux users, meanwhile one of our sysadmins accidentally upgraded Debian by two releases at once (From Debian 9 to 11) and it still "just worked"...
I run pure Debian stable everywhere I can in my personal life (laptops, desktops, servers). It's predictable and there's not a lot of planning at update OR upgrade time. Backup, push the button, reboot, done.
Just kidding, backups happen daily automatically, so it's just update and reboot.
You're describing endeavourOS. It's Arch, but with an installer that gets you a sane default desktop quickly.
It's what I use now that I'm too old to waste all that time it takes to get Arch running properly
IMO it combines the best of both worlds.