The arch iso offers a install guide nowadays (archinstall), so nah not that much.
Arch Linux
The beloved lightweight distro
As a Mint user who just starting test-driving Arch: once you get through the installation the switch isn't at all difficult. Now,t hat having been said, the installation can have some frustrating moments depending on how you go about it.
I just switched over today just to see what its all about. I've been using linux as my only OS for about a year now. Been on ubuntu, pop, fedora, etc... Sysadmin by trade. I am a linux novice I'd say. Not a noob, but not an expert. Still have a lot of issues just figuring out startup/service stuff, etc...
Followed this guide: https://gist.github.com/mjnaderi/28264ce68f87f52f2cabb823a503e673 (I wanted my drive encrytped).
I am up and running and basically back to where I was on fedora 40. I was doing this mainly to always be on the latest. Having to learn pacman and yay. I am finding I can get everything running but it's definitely more involved.
No regrets just it did take a few hours. Not sure if it was worth it tbh at this point. lol
If I need to reinstall arch, I'm going to use endeavorOS. The entire time I was setting it up, I was like "why am I doing this?". I automate everything I can at my job, why am I doing this the old fashion way...
It was really worth it for me. Having control of what stays and what doesn't is a big relief for me. I wanted switch away a few times when something broke but nothing was as smooth and curated like my arch linux setup.
Not much if you’re patient enough to set it up in the first place. It will generally frustrate you less once you figure it out and set it up properly. There is now text based installer that makes the installation fairly simple
I'd suggest you give this article a read. If this does sound appealing to you, go right ahead. If you think you'd be frustrated with having to make all these changes, Arch likely isn't something for you.
Arch requires a lot of effort to maintain.
Did you craft a very unorthodox and complex system? If so, I can believe you.
However, I went with a very traditional system with ext4, no fancy partitions, X11 and Gnome. I didn’t want my system to have anything experimental, because I knew I had to learn a bunch of stuff anyway. Just made everything as simple as possible, so that I can understand what’s going on.
So far, there hasn’t been a lot of system maintenance. Obviously it’s still more than what a Debian system would require, but nothing too crazy.