My experience is that arch isn’t for the first time users (with rare exceptions). I think that Arch is the ‘wrenchable car’ equivalent.

When a is person learning how to drive the aim isn’t to immediately train them on how to do mechanical work on the car… It’s to learn how to make it do its primary task of transporting people and goods.

Once they have basic competency in driving it’s a laudable idea to teach then how to maintain the vehicle so they don’t have to spend a large amount of money on experts (mechanics, IT). If the only vehicles they ever drive are super complex then they won’t be able to understand how it works. This is where the ‘wrenchable car’ comes in. Choosing a vehicle that has manageable complexity and isn’t hard to do the work on.

Arch requires you to assemble the system as part of the installation. The documentation is fantastic, but it’s still written like a service manual. Arch also does poorly if you fail to do maintenance like keeping updated. Choosing a more beginner-focused OS like Pop or Mint is going to set a new user who doesn’t have any understanding up for more likely success. Once they know how to get the system out of park and can drive it around the digital block, it might be time to show them how to build that self-assemble kit that lets you change the color of the dash lights.

Arch happened to be the final step I needed to walk away from windows, but that came after flirting with various distributions for more than a decade. One of those attempts was Gentoo, and that was a disaster. I don’t think that I would have been successful if I had tried arch much earlier than I did.