this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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If you want to use arch for the first time use an already setup distro like Manjaro.
I disagree. If you want to use Arch for the first time, install it the Arch way. It's going to be hard, and that's the point. Arch will need manual intervention at some point, and you'll be expected to fix it.
If you use something like Manjaro or CachyOS, you'll look up commands online and maybe it'll work, but it might not. There's a decent chance you'll break something, and you'll get mad.
Arch expects you to take responsibility for your system, and going through the official install process shows you can do that. Once you get through that once, go ahead and use an installer or fork. You know where to find documentation when something inevitably breaks, so you're good to go.
If you're unwilling to do the Arch install process but still want a rolling release, consider OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It's the trunk for several projects, some of them commercial, so you're getting a lot of professional eyeballs on it. There's a test suite any change needs to pass, and I've seen plenty of cases where they hold off on a change because a test fails. And when it does fail (and it probably will), you just
snapper rollbackand wait a few days. The community isn't as big as other distros, so I don't recommend it for a first distro, but they're also not nearly as impatient as Arch forums.Arch is a great distro, I used it for a few years without any major issues, but I did need to intervene several times. I've been on Tumbleweed about as long and I've only had to
snapper rollbacka few times, and that was the extent of the intervention.Yeah, there are many people that just want the system to work and not have to become full time geeks like some of us are. There are also plenty of distros, atomic or not, that provide that experience. Perfect match. There's a distro for everyone, from anti-tech people to full blown rocket scientists.
I 100% agree. If you want the Arch experience, you should have the full Arch experience IMO, and that includes the installation process. I don't mean this in a gatekeepy way, I just mean that's the target audience and that's what the distro is expecting.
For a new user, I just cannot recommend Arch because, chances are, that's not what they actually want. Most new users want to customize stuff, and you can do that with pretty much every distro.
For new users, I recommend Debian, Mint, or Fedora. They're release based, which is what you want when starting out so stuff doesn't change on you, and they have vibrant communities. After using it for a year or two, you'll figure out what you don't like about the distro and can pick something else.