I haven't run Arch Linux, but what I've heard is that you have to know what you're doing in order to run it. So I'm surprised it's the most popular Linux OS after SteamOS. Is it actually less difficult than I heard?
It was much rougher in the early days, as there were massive fundamental changes - adopting systemd, /lib becoming symlinks, etc.
But now I wouldn't use anything else. I have my configurations synced with a Gitlab repo via chezmoi, and have a bootable customised USB stick built with ALMA - so I can easily set up the same system on different machines. In that time I've used different set-ups - dwm on an 11" netbook (could only have one app per workspace and they had to be full-screen), xmonad and awesome-wm for a bit, and now i3.
One issue to note on the Steam Deck though is that it's immutable by default. So atm to install the xone drivers for example, you have to enable system mutability and reinstall them after every system update.
But it's so nice having something that is up-to-date - e.g. for kernel hardware support, bug fixes, etc. but also won't change much unless you want it to. I even use it on my work computer now since my company allows it, and it's so much better than losing hours to intrusive updates on Mac (or Windows).
Following the Arch guides to get a fully working system was easy enough for a complete Linux noob like me. But you still need some basic knowledge about computing, for things like networking, file systems, drive partitioning and such. If you learned this knowledge from other operating systems then Arch Linux is fairly easy to setup by just following their guide.
It has great Wiki to start using it, and it is very stable considering it is a rolling release distro.
Back in the day Ubuntu upgrades were extremely painful for me because I had to use a few custom repositories to get up to date versions of common software and they broke upgrades. On Arch it is not really an issue because everything is up to date. And even if something breaks once in a few years, if you set it up yourself (not using Manjaro) you will most likely have a better understanding of Linux and you will be able to fix those issues. And if you check Arch news before updating, you will never run into those problems in the first place. :)
Also you don’t technically have to know what you are doing. Their guide is very helpful at guiding you, but it’s all commands you have to type out on the command line until you get to a more GUI environment.
It's complicated, but the Arch Linux docs are fantastic.
Didn't try gaming on it, though - I have a Steam Deck for that ;) Though I can plug in a keyboard, mouse and monitor and switch to desktop mode on the deck if I need to work, so maybe I'll just use that as my laptop now
That being said I believe the Steam Deck OS is an arch derivative. I will allow this one to be the exception to the rule.
That's even less true these days, now that there's an official installer, and variants like Manjaro exist.