It sounds like you're the kind of person who wants a computer that "just works" with user-friendly point/click software out of the box.
You're absolutely not the target audience of Arch Linux, nor this "Arch-like" Windows install guide.
Personally, I learned more about modern Linux userspace by following the Arch install process (and subsequently maintaining an Arch install for daily-driver use) than I ever did from 5+ years of using Ubuntu desktop.
And I did it 2005 with gentoo and scratch... it's unnecessary and you could have learned the same using ubuntu or whatever distro without debugging your system. But you are right as a noob it probably helps to do everything by hand at least once. The most annoying part about Arch is that if you look in forums, reddit or mailinglits a lot of users don't really learn to debug. They fuck up their system and install from scratch... so in the end a lot of them are really good at installing Arch but nothing else.
This is a pretty interesting perspective because my experience of using Arch for a decade is that the Arch forums are a great treasure trove of learning how to troubleshoot a Linux desktop. I also have never seen any prescribed advice of reinstalling from scratch and rather the recommended approach is booting a live image and chrooting into your system to actually fix what's broken when something truly is borked. This is also why there's such a hefty RTFM culture around the distro and avoiding going through the install without actually understanding what you're doing.
Arch has been the most stable desktop system I've ever used, but a lot of that stability comes from understanding exactly what is installed and configured, which is something I personally never got with Ubuntu or other fully configured distros
I've used Linux for more than 15 years now and my salary depends on how good I am with Linux.
Although I agree you learn a lot with these distros, nowadays I just want something that works out of the box. If you spend years professionally bringing up Linux boxes, you don't want to it in your free time...
I guess I'm not the target audience either because all I did was use the archinstall script that comes with the ISO and had an arch installation on btrfs with KDE up and running in about 5 minutes tops.
I don't even want to install Windows at all, yet M$ has made almost every business it's subordinate, where the businesses uncritically do what M$ demands of them while they pay M$ ungodly sums of money.
My workplace uses it, but I've been able to run a few small companies from Linux only. (One is very profitable, but its a medical company, its hard not to be profitable in Medical in the US. Two are barely profitable, the others are non-profits or havent launched yet.)
LibreOffice sucks, but it still does the job. I often use google docs/drive instead.
Everything else runs on Linux, my CAD, 3D printer, my video editing, AI Art. My workflow is easier/faster without dealing with forced Windows updates and having to sort my autosaves.
I think we are at the point, Linux can be a daily driver. I'm amazed to say this, for the last 15 years, I've been critical about how hard it is to maintain a linux distro. Today, I think its harder to manage a windows install, too many forced updates and malware/bloatware that are impossible to uninstall.
The Arch install is literally
1. partition your system
2. mount /
3. run 1 command to actually install the system
4. install grub
Sure, it's a bit gatekeepy if you haven't done it before, but it teaches you a lot of useful things about how a Linux system works, that you'll undoubtedly need if you plan to use Arch.
You don't need to be taught again and again, you should just know it. I haven't had to install it in years but I bet I can get an usable system in 10 minutes.
I wouldn't mind a graphical installer but my point is that the install process reflects the experience of actually using it - it's a tinkerer's system, and from time to time you'll need to spend an hour reading the Wiki. If you're not willing to do it for the install, you'd probably also be miserable using the damn thing - the system is honest with what it is from the get go, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
That's because Arch is not a consumer product. It is an enthusiast Linux project, perhaps a bit too hyped up, that is usually manually installed because that's the way it is.
> Imagine any other consumer product boasting about teaching you things, instead of just do what it means to do.
Plenty of consumer products does just this? Raspberry PI basically spawned an entire industry around this very idea. Bunch of analog musical instruments does the same, some even come with signal graphs and such to teach you the insides of the instrument.
You can write your own installer script that will set things up exactly how you want to do it, which many others have done so before, if going through the manual process every installation is tedious.
There's even the (not so official) archinstall script built into the live ISO if you want a guided installation process.
But the core philosophy of the distro is that it targets users with a certain base-level of competence in working with Linux and provides them a simple, close to bleeding-edge distro; so it does do what it means to do.
> Actually it's worse than that they used to have a TUI installer but then removed it
Not sure what you're referring to here. Archinstall [1] is relatively recent [2]. I used it a few weeks ago to quickly yeet a machine into Arch for some testing. Worked flawlessly and had the machine from live boot -> Arch install on root media in under 5 minutes.
I remember using TUI for Arch installation 10+ years ago. I think it also was named archinstall iso back then. But it had some limitations. I do prefer the way it is right now though, it seems rather simple.
They had a TUI installer which was just a rebranded `bsdinstall` from FreeBSD. They got rid of it around ~2009 IIRC because it was objectively bad and they moved away from doing releases. Nowadays they've added a new installer, and as far as people told me it's way better. I still install Arch the Arch way, of course, or rather, I haven't installed Arch since 2014, I've been `rsync`-ing stuff around for a while until 2017, and then `zfs send`-ing the same install over from one computer to another. It's faster and less annoying than setting everything up from scratch IMHO.
The installation is minimal because arch is a minimal developer effort distro. Think of arch as a bunch of devs making a distribution for themselves and if anyone else happens to use it, that's fine. It makes a lot of their decisions make a lot more sense.
