I also felt a little underwhelmed, I thought the installation would be more difficult.

If you are not in it for the memeing I find it to be a great distro.

If you want a challenge that may or may not be worth it, try configuring NixOS. And I mean really get into it, try to configure everything using Nix. It's very time consuming but not boring, each configuration varies person to person (i.e the way you organize it) so it can be quite fun if you have the time.

Also nixpkgs (what Nix and NixOS use) has like, all the packages

You forgot one thing: “I use Arch BTW!”

Those people are mostly just a meme, I rarely see people actually doing that anymore, although I'm sure they exist. If you want my personality out of it, spend more time customizing. You can look into optimizations, theming, or delve into window managers if you really want to make it your own. There's a lot of options.

I prefer a minimal install of Debian personally. Someone should make a rolling release apt-based/debian-based distro and I'd hop right on it. Technically Kali is one and I do daily drive that, but it's not something I can really recommend to people as a general use distro.

Anyway if you want something more tangibly different (and difficult to install) try running OpenBSD :)

You should go for a distro that matches what you want out of your system. You want stable? Find some strong LTS distro like Ubuntu. You want ULTRA STABLE? Go for an immutable distro. Do you want to use your system for gaming? Go for a distro with wide gaming support, built-in drivers with options for proprietary drivers.

It's less about what base distro you're using and more about what you like about that particular flavor of distro.

For example, I use my PC for gaming mostly, but also coding. I switched from Pop! (Ubuntu based) to Garuda (Arch based) and I love it because it's really good for gaming, comes with Mangohud, Gamemode, Steam, Heroic, controller drivers, graphics drivers, etc, all optionally pre-installed. I also really like KDE apps because they're performant and slick so I got the Plasma version.

Anyway, yeah, focus less on "this distro is Arch based" and more on what each distro can provide you as far as your personal tastes.

Just do ./install_arch.sh

Now use Gentoo

I really like Arch because it’s bare metal but not too much => it’s very easy to choose the components you need for your installation and exactly fine-tune your experience without spending too much time with something like Nix/LFS/Slackware.

• it’s community supported, lightweight, fast, and easy to use when you know what you’re doing (wow this sentence is dumb but you get me right?)

I’ve been using Debian for many years now. The hardest part about switching my desktop to arch (partly to try something different, partly for later kernel / tools) was not that arch is difficult, but that I need to type ‘sudo pacman -S’ instead of ‘sudo apt install’ to install new packages. It is functionally the same in my day to day use which is fantastic.

I can only use Arch, because I know how I set it up.

Preinstalled distros, even arch based seem overwhelming to me nowadays. I just prefer to set up Arch Linux myself so I know what minimal steps I did and what package I have

I mean if you want to be blasé about the fact not everyone has the same technical skills as you, sure…

I tried it out because of the memes and stuck with it because there wasn't a bunch of extra stuff I don't need distracting me. I kinda forget I'm using arch btw

Did you use arch-install or manual classic install

What do you mean by people being obsessed over Arch?

Archlinux is Linux, it's just a minimal distro that allows you to only use whatever you want to use. I have no idea what's with being obsessed over it other than «use arch btw» which became a local meme recently.

Ya, its just some people over exaggerated a bit. As long as you don't do stuff that obviously tries to mess with core system stuff it should be fine.

Yes

You have reached the pinnacle of Linux, every other distro you try from now on will seem bland. 🧗🏼