It is, but the packages are slightly held back and therefore the system is more stable.

automatic hardware detection

I don't understand that point at all. How is Arch different in that regard & I'm asking this as an experienced Linux user managing multiple Debian & Arch boxes.

So I wanted to hear some experiences of you, that you may have had in the past considering EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Manjaro and Arch itself.

If you want to go down this road & are confident in your technical ability & mental fortitude to maintain such a system long term, then just go with vanilla Arch & go through the installation process once. The real difficulty of Arch is dealing with the every day minor & major breakages that come with updates. Learning something from the install procedure is actually helpful with that.
The main point is that not only is the real difficulty maintenance, but none of the popular Arch flavors do anything meaningful to help with that. It's just you and the terminal at the end of the day. Saving a couple hours on the install process is not going to help you at all.

Manjaro is conceptually garbage ran by incompetent people so it's not even worth considering.

I personally have gone for Manjaro now, kind of hoping that it won’t break on the attempt to cut themselves of the company side of Manjaro and becomming they’re own non-profit.

Oh okay, oof. Let me explain then. Their concept of holding back packages by one week & still having / advertising the AUR means additional instability. This or that library or dependency gets an update & then the updated AUR package will break with your one week old stuff. Furthermore far more often than not they still push the broken package, because they would need a similar contributor base to main Arch to actually vet & test everything which they'll never have no matter what they do. What they call an additional safety net is almost never one. Sure if Arch pushed a broken grub update, that's like the one thing you could a avoid with Manjaro, but if you cannot fix / research such a problem (chroot or refind & reinstall grub), then you have no business using such a distro to begin with.

CachyOS is in a weird spot, but I cannot really recommend them, because they push new kernels too soon, to the point of ridiculousness.

EoS is vanilla Arch with a gui installer basically. It's barely a distro, but their community forums are great for new users to ask "dumb" questions. I can fully recommend every noob Arch user this community, they'll help you even if you are not using EoS, they've certainly helped & taught me a lot back then.

Garuda is the same as EoS, but there is some added graphical flare, which you can add yourself to any Linux system if you wanted to.

If you are a new user who is worried about old packages, then you should be using Fedora, that's pretty much it. Arch can be good too, but it's for a technical user who is really interested in Linux beyond just using their computer.

Bootable BTRFS snapshots and a less fast update schedule are the biggest differences AFAIK.

I would probably have gone with Slowroll if it was ready to go when I installed Tumbleweed.

No issues here (: for years

I think you meant to say Manjaro

I'll advice you to go with Fedora, because rolling release distro often cause issues, but Fedora has not too old packages like Debian and gets major updates 2x a year, don't worry about driver and app updates you'll get them as you would on amy distro.

Ill put it this way; me and a mate switched to Linux as our main drivers at roughly the same time. Both of us have a background in development (him more), I switched to Fedora, he to Cachy.

It is now roughly two years later. He has switched his distro multiple more times. Im still on Fedora because it just works.

Arch based distros are for tinkerers and customisers. Sure it can just work too, but if you dont tinker then theres no real point/ advantage.

That's absolutely true

Hey, sorry, I did not mean to argue with your very comment, but rather in general. Your comment is a nice addition to mine, by elaborating what the complexities are.

It’s just that it may be beginner friendly if the beginner is able to learn and explore (having time and headspace to learn those things). With Arch you have to know what you need, but apart from setting up the system, there’s nothing to learn. Say, I have never used KDE or Gnome on Arch, but I think I’d manage, if I’d need to. (I used them on Debian and Fedora, and on Arch I use only Sway, which I’m comfortable with.)

So, to someone, Arch may be the same thing as the Arch-based distro, considering that the person running it accepts they have to set their resources for learning this new system.

I started using Linux with Ubuntu (about 20 years ago), and I regret it. Wasted time. It was shite even back then. I’m not even interested in where they’re now. If I’d started Arch about that time (not sure it was around, maybe it was), or Gentoo as the friend recommended (in such a tone I got it that it’s too difficult for me to start with), I’d be in a much better place today. Instead, I used Debian and distro-hopped here and there. I’m mostly happy with Arch. I don’t run Gentoo because I don’t know it, and these days, in contrast to 20 years ago, I’m too packed with running errands that it rather sounds as a fun hobby project once nobody wants anything from me at least for a weekend, or better for a week or two.

I am pretty sure you can replace most Arch-based distros with a good manual (assuming it’s updated). Unfortunately, the Arch Wiki is nowhere near, but it’s something at least.

And probably a few scripts that automate typical setup and make it pretty can help too. You can even get many million dollars support from other rich guys, if you do that.

What caused you to abandon Bazzite?

MX is also solid for older Nvidia cards. The installer tool picks patched drivers for you in case they are needed.
This is mostly up to preference, I don't like CachyOS as much as I don't like the rolling release model.

I think you're suffering a bit from this: https://xkcd.com/2501/

You know the feeling you have about Gentoo? That's the feeling for someone going to Linux, even to Ubuntu, the more complications you add the worse the feeling is.

Arch is not hard, it's not complicated, but there's a lot of unknowns unknowns that can bite a newcomer in the ass. If you're already familiar with Linux Arch is easy peasy, just like Gentoo, it's just some small things you have to learn.

Think about it this way, you're already familiar with 99% of what Gentoo will ask of you and still it's not something you're up for doing, imagine the frustration of not knowing what's anything and having to go through that.

Installing arch with the arch install script is the hardest step, but it's quite managable if you've got decent computer literacy, but no linux knowledge (and it becomes a trivial step if you use an arch based distro that uses calamares).

And once you're up and running, it's easy.

As I said, that's how I started with linux a few years back, and I came in to it with no linux knowledge. I moved from Arch to CachyOS at some point, but Arch was easy enough. I can speak to this scenario from first hand experience!

Yeah, you’re right. Still, I think the more complex distros teach you wrong things, and you never arrive to the point of proper understanding what’s up. So delving into some complex things for a while may be much simpler than a novice expects, and faster get them to the point of somewhat understanding what they need.

Oddly enough, it wasn't that it felt weird to me (it did but I figured that was just the switch to Linux), it was that the immutability wouldn't let me change the login screen background, lol. After a few days googling and trying to hack it, I gave up and switched to a distro that didn't have that locked down.

After I switched I realized that Garuda felt better to me overall too, but the vibe of an OS is a hard thing to measure until you feel the difference.

Interesting! I’ve been a longtime Linux user mostly with debian-based systems (Debian, Ubuntu, Pop!) And it’s been interesting to me how one small thing or another will do that.

For me it is usually Kerberos / domain authentication things that are unnecessarily tough to set up in one distro or another.

Yep, Fedora just works. And it doesnt feel as clunky as Mint or Ubuntu.