I’m not a computer expert or planning to be. I’m just a computer user, a coder, a gamer, and I think I will get the opportunity to afford cheaper PCs if I use the Arch distro from Linux which is very lightweight and fast. I’ve heard Microsoft forces you to bloat your PC with win11.
Then don’t use Arch. Seriously, where are you guys even finding out about Arch, much less wanting to try it? Whoever told you Arch would be a good fit, don’t listen to them on anything Linux-related again. Arch is not for beginners, and it’s not for people who don’t want to learn the ins and outs of their computer because they’re having to dig into the guts to fix it whenever an update breaks something. Arch is a fine distro for people who WANT those things, need bleeding edge hardware support, and don’t mind having to fix it whenever it breaks. It doesn’t sound like that’s at all what you’re looking for though.
It’s likely idiots confusing normal arch and things like endeavour or cachy.
Pre built arch distros are legitimately as bullet proof as something like mint. Everything’s guis, everything’s pre done by the distro mainter, and you basically have to do nothing.
This isn’t 2003 anymore. Arch based distros dont just randomly explode any more or less then fedora or Ubuntu or popos at this point.
For heaven sake steamos is arch. Arch is unironically likely the single most commonly used distro for new users of the last few years because of the steamdeck.
A new user shouldn’t be doing arch from scratch, but a distro is a distro they don’t just go boom because of random happenstance.
I don’t know about Steam OS but with EndeavourOS, you still have to keep an eye on the Arch news and make any manual interventions that are required. If you don’t, you can end up with a broken system. If you do that, it’s utterly reliable.
I can second CachyOS. The last time it caused me headaches was kinda my own fault. VirtualBox needed some dependencies which I didn’t read thru, then it installed an older kernel version for some god damn reason and I lost my ethernet driver. Took me quite some time to figure it out, but as I said, not Cachy’s fault!
I wouldn’t say arch and arch-based are the same thing. If someone specifically asks about arch, I’d be inclined to advise them it’s not suitable for people not interested in reading and learning a bit. But I also agree arch-based are pretty solid and much more beginner friendly.