Arch exists for good reason, and if you’re not comfortable with the complexity of setup just use another distro?
Fedora, Mint and Ubuntu both exist if you want a simpler installer. I’ve started using Bazzite on more machines too and couldn’t be happier with the results.
Genuinely I think most people just confuse distro with desktop environment. If you don’t actually need arch just go with another simpler distro and set up the DE you need.
People who want the benefits of Arch (e. g. pacman, AUR, arch wiki, rolling release, having only one package management instead of using deb + snap + flatpak + appimage + installing scripts) without needing to spend hours installing and configuring Arch.
> Fedora, Mint and Ubuntu both exist if you want a simpler installer.
In fact, nowadays it's harder for me to understand why would someome install Fedora. There are less rpm packages than deb packages (which is a downside compared to ubuntu/mint/debian); there's no AUR, you'll need to find a way to install what's missing; it is bleeding edge but not rolling release, which doesn't really make sense for me.
> Genuinely I think most people just confuse distro with desktop environment
In the case of Ubuntu or Mint, yes, it happens. But not in case of Manjaro, if you go to its page you'll still need to choose one of the several DEs that are availabe, there are options even with i3 and sway. It's not like Ubuntu that you'll need to know the existence of Kubuntu
Fedora and its derivatives have been great for me. No issues with my rx9070xt and felt like magic compared to my windows partition. It’s not rolling-release, but if that’s important surely this is where where base Arch shines for full control?
Manjaro feels like an awkward middle ground to me and my experience with it a few years ago was negative. Though I understand it may have improved. I don’t have use case for it.
As for package formats, for opensource, compiling from source or COPR has worked for me.
In my experience the diff from cold install Arch vs Manjaro is certanly not "hours". You need maybe 30 min to bootstrap Arch and once you have pacman you quickly have DE and you are practically there.
If you know exactly what you're doing, ok, but why should I remember something that I'll do few times and that can be done in a nice GUI installer?
I have installed Arch in VMs for several reasons and once I installed Arch in my computer because "why not?". I spent some hours (yes, hours) installing arch, configuring post-install stuff, trying to figure out why my wi-fi wasn't working and installing basic stuff (Firefox, KDE apps, Emacs, etc). When I finished, I looked to it and thought "well, after all this time what I have here is a Manjaro".
That's what Manjaro is, another distro. I'm not a fan of it, but EndeavourOS is pure arch with graphical installer, what's wrong with it? (apart from users opening issues or asking questions about specifics in Arch forums)
Arch has an awesome wiki, package manager and tooling, among other nice things. Arch is not only a complex installer of linux. I think that point of view is elitist
It's just Arch with some extra bells and whistles out of the box.
This describes about 85% of all Linux distros. It's just something else with extras.