> That's always been positioned to me as the one for hackers and experimentalists

I thought so too, that's why I mostly used Ubuntu up until 22.04 sometime, used Ubuntu since I moved before that. Then I moved to Arch, and everything just got so much easier. Upgrading Ubuntu versions was a bit hit-or-miss, especially if you'd changed configs for one reason or another. And after 22.04>22.10 failed for whatever reason, I restarted with Arch then never looked back.

Probably it helped that I already knew Arch by the time I started using it, compared to starting to use Ubuntu coming from Windows and not knowing squat.

But now with an installer, good defaults, and a helpful community (maybe slightly controversial) I think Arch can be a pretty good beginner OS, as long as you want to understand how your system is put together.